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.

This week we tested the curry recipe. As you may remember, the recipe didn’t state any sort of quantity for any of its ingredients. To some this may render a recipe unworkable, but we here at Stranger Eats have two advantages: We don’t know any better, and our budget dictates that we have to eat it no matter what.

In keeping with the spirit of the recipe as it was given us, I didn’t measure anything. As far as quantities go, all I know is we used one onion, one tomato, four chicken breasts, and one 12 ounce can of tomato paste. The spices were just sort of thrown in willy-nilly. It turned out all right, but this one will need revisiting.

My knee-jerk reaction was to call this one a failure and move on, but the mere mention of cooking seemed to cause this guy to mature by about ten years. This may be our most viable recipe yet! Also, I love anyone who gets excited enough to yell about hot sauce.

You’re now chatting with a random stranger…

Ok, so I got this recipe for chicken curry, but here’s the thing: Not once did this person state a quantity of any sort. We will have to approach this one from the “Wing It” angle. WARNING: The conversation itself is boring. Seriously, terribly dull.

You’re now chatting with a random stranger…