A Spanish Quiche from a French Website. Confused? Don't be! Quiche Andalouse, or Andalusian Quiche

 

 

I have been weaning myself off buying cookbooks because it is becoming a worrying obsession which not only threatens to bankrupt me, but ultimately might result in my moving out to live in the garage because there is no room left in the house. We are not at the state of hoarding just yet but many more years of impulse purchasing and it will all end badly. It has to. You can get too much of a good thing. So, I have been getting my 'new' recipe fix from the Internet and I have become a fan of the French website, Marmiton, in which I can peruse thousands of yummy recipes, sat at the computer with a mug of tea and a sense of culinary adventure. The added bonus is that I get to practise my French as I translate the recipes into English, thus hopefully leaving me confidently chatty for when I buy my little corner of France with a garden of fruit trees, a veg plot, a light and airy kitchen, a Summer of blue skies and a pretty much constant stream of French wine from the local vineyard. I can live in hope, and there's always the lottery. Don't stop believing!

 

So, I like quiche. It's the thing I gravitate towards at buffets and I can eat far too much of it. You can keep your vol-au-vents, quiche is where it is at. I also find it a way of using up stuff and a way to cheat if needs be and that is what I did here. If I were anything close to a dedicated cook I would have made my own shortcrust but, yes readers, I bought it. (Good stuff actually - if you buy a good quality one it is like making it yourself but you can hurl together a meal in 10 minutes or so and slam it in the oven. Not bad for a school night tea)

 

I had (and always have) chorizo in the fridge because everybody in this house adores it, and it was after a rummage in the freezer that I discovered a bag of prepared peppers, covered in something resembling permafrost which would benefit greatly from being sauteed in the burnished oil left behind from cooking the chorizo. The original recipe says use ordinary peppers and skin them but, you know, life is sometimes far too short. I added an onion to the recipe too.

 

This is a lovely dish. The meaty, salty, richness of the chorizo is cut by the sweet, clean taste of the sauteed peppers, all enveloped in an unctuous creamy eggy custard. Yum.

 

Quiche Andalouse or Andalusian quiche translated and then adapted from the Marmiton website

 

Serves Lola, Finn, Mum and Dad twice

 

Ingredients

 

A block or packet of ready rolled good quality shortcrust pastry (I lined a 25cm flan tin with this and had some over to make another tart. Happy days! Freeze what you don't need.)
2 red peppers
1 green pepper (or a generous handful of ready prepped or frozen peppers)
20 slices of chorizo (I used a packet of cooking chorizo, sliced into rounds)

one onion, diced
6 eggs
300ml cream
Salt and pepper

Method:

Preheat the oven to 170c and put a baking sheet into the oven to heat up.

 

 

Prepare your flan tin and then line with the pastry.

If you need to, dip the peppers in boiling water for 5 minutes to peel more easily. Cut into thin strips.

 

Precook the sausage in boiling water a few minutes to degrease (optional, but I fried mine off a little to take the rawness away and decanted some of the oil).

 

Remove the chorizo from the pan and then fry the onion and the peppers in the residual oil until starting to soften a little. Remove and combine with the chorizo in a bowl.

 

 

Mix the eggs with the cream. salt and pepper. Stir in peppers and chorizo. Taste the mixture for seasoning.

Pour the custard mixture into the prepared tin and then carefully place into the oven, onto the baking sheet.

 

 

Bake for about 25 - 30 minutes

 

 

Leave to stand for about 10 minutes or so. A hot quiche can do untold damage to the roof of the mouth!