Stranger Eats

It’s a well-kept secret that quiche is totally awesome. Seriously, ask just about anyone and they’ll tell you that quiche is “Alright, I guess” or “Not really worth the calories” or “a little gay.” Don’t listen to these people. Quiche is pie you can have for breakfast, and I challenge you to come up with a better idea. For anything. This conversation was brief and to the point, so I’ll just post the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 9″ baked pie shell
1 cup grated Swiss cheese
3 large eggs
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 pkg. original Hidden Valley Ranch Mix
2 tbs or so of bacon bits (or other cooked meat)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Sprinkle cheese in pie shell. Whisk eggs til frothy. Add other ingredients and mix. Pour over cheese. Bake 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 250 degrees and bake 15-20 minutes until center is set.

We’ve done this a few times and haven’t had to modify the recipe much, but our oven sucks a lot so we do bake it a few extra minutes. As you can see, the first one didn’t really bake long enough. Also, it’s important to let it sit and cool off before serving, which would have been nice to know beforehand. On our most recent attempt I left out some cream (oh, and we use half and half instead of heavy cream) because seriously, it’s hard to justify a whole cup of cream for something you’re going to eat half of. We’ve also experimented with different meat/cheese combinations. Chicken is great but you don’t have to cook ham. Ham wins. Oh, and we used a little black pepper and no ranch mix. The ranch mix just seemed gratuitous, really.

Note: When making quiche it’s important to grunt and swear a lot, and punch things, to counteract the fact that quiche is a little gay (those people are right).

holy crap you guys it was so good

Ok, so the homemade pizza recipe is awesome. In fact, we’ve made it three times already and our grocery list always includes “whatever we need to make more pizza.” We have, however, had to tweak the dough recipe a bit. Here’s the original. Ours follows:

schuyler mixin' it up

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon oregano, plus any other herbs we have at the time (basil, rosemary etc)

1 teaspoon black pepper

2 eggs, beaten (into submission)

1 cup milk

We didn’t change anything else, so I won’t type out the rest here. Just visit that link for complete instructions. We did find that the crust tends to form huge gas bubbles, we’re still working on that problem.

i wasn't kidding about the bubbles

We also grease the baking sheet with olive oil, because it’s a crappy baking sheet that everything in the world sticks to and we’d never get our pizza off of it otherwise. Although come to think of it, maybe the olive oil is causing it to stick… I’ll have to investigate further, next time we make pizza (probably tonight, it is awesome.)

And now, the toppings. The beauty of homemade pizza is, of course, choosing your own toppings. We’re still looking for our favorites, but the consensus is that sausage is excellent but chicken is also excellent and a lot cheaper.

pesto, for those times when you don't want anyone to stand close to you for at least three days

ordering pizza is expensive because someone else has to do all this slicing

We’re still adjusting the dough recipe and looking for the perfect toppings, but once we have it down we’ll share our Masterpiece Pizza with the world.

Ok, so we tried the meatball recipe, and it was good. Actually it was really good, worth doing again. We did, however, make a few blunders, as you will see.

Here’s our interpretation of the recipe:

• 1 Lb ground turkey
• 1 Lb ground pork
• 1 onion, chopped
• two eggs
• salt and pepper

Seems pretty simple, just mix everything together, right? Well, not really. After cooking the first few, we realized that two eggs was probably enough for one pound of meat. We used two pounds, and our balls were just falling apart all over the place. We also didn’t chop the onion nearly finely enough, which probably didn’t help them stick together. Next time we try this we’ll also add some breadcrumbs for extra cohesiveness. Now, on with the recipe.

We heated some olive oil (didn’t have canola handy) and garlic in a skillet. Once the garlic started to brown we put our balls in the skillet. The first one became a casualty, it was too big to stick together and cook all the way through. So I smashed it. As we went on Schuyler kept rolling the balls smaller and smaller, hoping that they would actually cook all the way through. We finally got it right towards the end.

Once all the meatballs were cooked we made “brown sauce”. Brown sauce, it turns out, is just gravy without flour. It’s also way tastier than it looks. All I did was add milk to the meatball skillet, throw in a bunch of salt and pepper, and cook it until it thickened. This was supposed to go on mashed potatoes (I think? Our Omego was not entirely clear on this), but we all know mashed potatoes are for jerks. Also, people with mixers. I made roasted potatoes instead, here’s how:

• Whole bunch of red potatoes, diced into 1/2″ cubes
• olive oil
• seasonings (I used cajun seasoning and Cavender’s Greek Seasoning)

Put the diced potatoes in a large mixing bowl. Add enough olive oil to coat them evenly. Add enough seasoning that it’s plainly visible on every piece of potato. Spread the seasoned potatoes out onto a baking sheet and bake at, I dunno, like 350 degrees or something, until toasty brown. The best, and simplest, way to cook potatoes!

And the completed dish:

Mmm, delicious. But something is missing… Oh yeah, vegetable. After all this, cooking broccoli seemed like more trouble than it was worth. So:

Today we celebrate our first recipe test! You all remember the tosti, I’m sure… two sandwiches stuck together with cheese. Well as it turns out, that idea is completely awesome.

Here’s the recipe, as we interpreted it:

4 pieces of bread

2 kinds of meat (we chose sopressata and turkey)

2 kinds of cheese (we chose cheddar and mozzarella)

Butter

Butter one side of each of the pieces of bread. Place two pieces butter side down on a hot skillet. To one piece add a slice of cheddar cheese, to the other piece add mozzarella. To the piece with the cheddar, add two slices of turkey. To the piece with the mozzarella, add two slices of sopressata. Add a little more cheese to each, and then place the remaining pieces of bread on top, butter side up. Once the first side is toasted, flip the sandwiches over to toast the other side. Once this is done, flip them over once again and add a mixture of both cheeses to the top of one sandwich. Place one sandwich on top of the other and leave in skillet until cheese melts. If one side begins to burn, flip it over. Once cheese has melted, remove the sandwich from the skillet, cut in half, and serve.

It’s a little more involved than it sounded in the original conversation, especially when you consider that Schuyler whipped up some homemade bread for the occasion. But it’s really just a monster grilled cheese, and totally delicious.

To me, calling a pizza homemade when the only part you’ve made is the crust seemed like taking too much credit. But as I don’t expect the cheese or other toppings to be homemade, I guess it’s fine to put the sauce on the topping side of the line just this once. Be warned: This is the slippery slope that led to nobody being able to cook.

You’re now chatting with a random stranger…