Clean-Out-The-Fridge Quiche and Odds-N-Ends Tart

It’s awfully boring being a college student for the first month of the summer. After having your brain in high gear for the last two weeks of school rushing to finish projects, coming home and being able to put your feet up and do nothing until your job starts is strangely disorienting. If you’re me, your well-meaning family gives you jobs to do during the day – plan brother’s graduation party in June, vacuum floors, review book report, reschedule hotel reservations. Great. I’ve been occupied for two hours, tops. So what am I supposed to do for the rest of the day?

If you’re me, you attempt to bake something. Fortunately, that went hand in hand with one of my other jobs today – ‘reorganizing’ the fridge. Let me explain – for the better part of the last month, my sister’s been on a cooking rampage, trying to test-drive and photograph almost forty recipes for an independent study project. Some have turned out better than others, and many of them are currently taking up vast amounts of space in our fridge. So today I was tasked with ‘reorganzing’ the stuffed-to-bursting appliance. The first place to be attacked? Our crisper, where I found a bag of carrots, two cucumbers and a rather wilted head of lettuce all taking the mold cure, and a few more squash in danger of heading the same direction.

So my mission became not to bake something, but rather use up some of this produce so that it avoided going the way of the garbage gods and making a trip to that big compost pile in the sky. (Or my backyard, you know, whichever comes first.)

For some strange reason I wanted eggs for lunch, so I decided on quiche. And behold, two recipes, a lot of creative finagling and an hour and a half later, just in time for lunch, my very own Clean-Out-The-Fridge Quiche.

Adapted from recipes 1809 and 18185 on recipezaar.com

Clean-Out-The-Fridge Quiche

2 zucchini, shredded with the water pressed out
1 summer squash, shredded with the water pressed out
1 medium onion (or 2 small onions), minced
¼ cup sundried tomatoes in oil
5-7 leaves chopped fresh basil
5-7 leaves chopped fresh oregano
4 eggs, beaten
½ cup milk or half and half
1 tbsp flour
½ cheddar cheese

Crust
2 cups flour
½ tsp salt
½ cup ice water
½ cup canola oil

CRUST:

1.       1.With fork, mix together salt and flour.

2.      2. In separate bowl, combine ice water and oil, beating with fork until well combined.

3.       3.Mix oil-water into flour and stir until at a dough like consistency.

4.       4.Press into the bottom of a 9 in. pie pan.

5.       5.Proceed to make filling.

FILLING:

1.       6.Saute onions in a little canola oil until translucent.

2.       7.Making sure that zucchini and squash are as dry as possible, add squash, zucchini, and tomatoes to the onions in the pan and sauté until warmed through. Remove to large mixing bowl.

3.      8. Add eggs, cheese, milk, flour and the herbs to the mixture. Blend well, making sure that the egg covers all of the zucchini.

4.       9.Pour into prepared crust. Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. The filling will have risen slightly and the edges of the filling will be a golden brown.

But I wasn’t done yet! I had a little bit of my crust left over after doubling the recipe, so I pressed it into a cake pan and raided the fruit drawer, where I found a half-dozen apples and one very sad looking pear. And again, the cooking gods saw fit to grace me with another splash of inspiration, this one using the left over dough, the pear, and the last of a bag of trailmix I found in the pantry.

Odds-N-Ends Fruit Tart

Quiche dough (1/4 recipe)

1 very ripe pear
1 handful each of
-dried cranberries
-chopped walnuts
-chopped almonds.
2 tbsp sugar.

1.       1.Pat dough into bottom of metal baking dish. ( ¼ of a recipe should fill the bottom of a 6 inch baking pan.

2.      2. Slice pear (no need to peel) and lay slices in circles around the dish, overlapping when necessary.

3.       3.Sprinkle with sugar and chopped fruit/nut mix.

4.       4.Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Fruit should be soft and nuts toasted when removed from oven.

Fly by the seat of your pants cooking at its finest, I think. And it was all of it delicious.