quiches

Don't know what happened: one quiche ended up more suntanned than the other despite almost exactly the same timing. Anyway, neither is burned, and I'll be sharing both at work:

second quiche first—more suntanned

first quiche last: uneven, but not so suntanned

Both smell fantastic. It's hard to see in the above picture, but when I baked the lighter-colored quiche, the whole thing sat at an angle inside the oven (partly because the oven itself was at an angle). For the darker-colored quiche, I slipped some spiral-bound notebooks under the front feet of both my regular oven and my microwave oven so as to even both out. As a result, the darker quiche came out more even-looking despite its suntan.

Each quiche has a filling of: homemade Italian sausage, Korean bacon (not quite like streaky bacon), cooked-down spinach, thinly sliced and cooked mushrooms, dried-onion flakes, dried oregano, dried parsley, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and a savory custard of whole milk, heavy cream, and seven whole eggs. And of course, I used my idiot-proof pie crust, but without the sugar this time since I wasn't making another apple pie.

You cook the elements in the filling down because you want to avoid having too much water as the pie bakes: the stars of the show should be the custard and the cheese. Water creates steam, which could lead to weird holes in the final product. Then again, the quiches do bake for a long time in the oven, so maybe the water just evaporates out. I'll have to perform a test sometime, with fresh shrooms and spinach, to see what's going on.

As you see, I didn't do anything fancy with the crust.

I need to think about buying containers for things like cakes and pies that allow me to carry my creations safely from place to place without worrying about disasters like being crushed or sliding around. Here are some pie carriers. And here are some cake carriers.

Trivia: those aren't pie pans. They're my new cake pans, and they worked pretty well.