Tag: Broccoli

Broccoli & Stilton Quiche – Rye, England, 2019

I’ve been having a few holiday blues.  You know that time where the last one feels like a long time ago and the next one seems like a long way away.  So,  I thought that it might help my malaise to revisit some of my favourite meals from holidays past.

Rye was our first stop on our holiday this year and I ate an incredibly tasty Broccoli and Stilton quiche from the Rye Deli.

Broccoli & Stilton Quiche1

Rye is such a pretty town and full of antique and retro shops.  Well worth a visit!  If you are heading to the UK and want a great quiche and some cool glassware!  I bought some repro Babycham and Martini glasses. And some gorgeous vintage Laura Ashley cups and saucers.

 

Rye Glassware

The only things is…a bag full of glassware and a Broccoli and Stilton quiche are not good bag fellows.  I spent the day shopping and loading myself up with all the gorgeous glasses.  Meanwhile, my lovely quiche was getting squished to bits in my bag. It still tasted delicious but was certainly not in the pristine condition in which I bought it!

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I love quiche but tend to veer towards the classic Quiche Lorraine or a Spinach and Feta quiche as my go-to’s.  The Broccoli and Stilton Quiche squashed and battered though it was after a few hours of being pummelled in my backpack was a revelation.  Such a tasty combination!

And also so pretty! I love how the swirls and branches of the broccolini (which I used instead of broccoli) look like little plants, making this quiche look like some sort of whimsical garden

Because I was trying to keep it British, I used a recipe I found on the Ocado website.   However, in all honesty, this recipe was not as good as my original quiche from the Rye Deli.  I think it was the onions. I don’t recall any in the OG version but do like the way the rounds of the spring onion play off against the straight stems and the flowery whirls of the broccolini. So, my recommendation would be to halve the amount of spring onions and cook them off a bit first.

Apart from the antiquing and the fab quiche, great fish and chips and a v good bookstore,  Rye has some great olde worlde pubs

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.A very cool castle, complete with stocks for anyone misbehaving!

 

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And literary cred galore!

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My only peeve with Rye was that we arrived just after 9:00 pm.  And everywhere except for the fish and chip shop had closed or stopped serving food for the night.  This was in the height of holiday season so it was kind of surprising.  Having said that, the fish and chips were great so all was not lost.

If you can’t get to Rye, you can always get a taste of it by making a Broccoli and Stilton Quiche!  If you can get to Rye, get there before 9:00 pm!

Have a great week!

 

 

 

Retro Food For Modern Times – The Australian Vegetable Cookbook (1977)

I’m not flat-out saying that the photographer of the Australian Vegetable Cookbook was a psychopath (he’s probably still alive and looking for his next victim)….I’m just saying that I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that was the case.

Why would I even suggest such a thing?  Let’s just look at selection of photos:

Beetroot:

Broccoli:

Celery:

Eggplant…this is about where I started to see the pattern…

Lettuce:

Mushrooms:

Onions:

Parsnip:

Just in case you still haven’t got it, there is an almost always completely unnecessary knife in all of these pictures.  Sometimes it is coyly half hidden (Broccoli, onions) or off to the side, (mushrooms) but quite often front and centre, and in the case of the eggplant, gleaming evilly to boot.. It got to the point where I was searching pictures Where’s Wally style looking for the next one….I started to get disappointed when I didn’t find one. It was like a pictorial Stockholm Syndrome.

There is also a really scary looking chopper in the photo for Kohlrabi.  I don’t know much about Kohlrabi and maybe in Kohlrabi circles these implements are de rigueur but seriously this looks like it should belong in “50 Shades of Grey”, not in a vegetable cookbook!

Given this predilection, I couldn’t help reading the recipe for Broad (Fava) Beans and Bacon in full Hannibal Lector voice, finishing with “to be eaten with a glass of Chianti, Clarisse”.  I’m such a geek…

One of the best things about this book, and completely non-psychopathic is the pen and ink drawings of each vegetable.  These are lovely!

I can see a range of these  printed onto tea towels etc, as high-end kitchen ware. Imagine the peas above with a little bobble fringing….so vintage chic!

Along with the pen and ink drawings, there are  notes about the history, cultivation and some other fun facts about each vegetable  These can be interesting but, if you tend to be little bit….OCD like me, can seriously drive you insane…. Take for example, the seemingly innocuous statement on page 59 that:

“Eggplant (aubergine) is the fourth most important vegetable in Japan”

Most people would read that and move on with their lives.  I woke up in the middle of the night, wondering what numbers 1 through 3 were.   The book doesn’t tell you.  Which is really mean.  Who cares about fourth in anything?  Even bronze and silver are slightly dud…if you’re not going to tell me what THE most important vegetable in Japan is, don’t bother.  And…define importance?  Important how? Is it sacred?  Is is the (fourth) most grown? Eaten? Exported? Nutritious?  It’s half past three in the morning dammit and you’re giving me nothing!

Modern media is no help either.  If you Google “eggplant in Japan”, the top entry is about a Japanese comedian who, as part of a reality tv show,  was locked in an apartment and forced to enter magazine competitions until he earned $1 million yen.   For some bizarre reason he was also naked the whole time.  In order not to offend viewers, if his…erm…manly parts appeared on the screen they covered them with a cartoon of an eggplant.  No, really.  They did.  I couldn’t make this s**t up if I tried.

Ok, so back to…..what the hell was I talking about?  How on earth did I end up talking about naked Japanese comedians?  Well, I guess we kind of know why eggplants are important now.  They are to the Japanese what the fig leaf was to the Ancient Greeks.

Ah yes, back on track….now!  The descriptions of the vegetables  in these paragraphs sometimes makes them sound utterly repulsive.  Take for instance, the following:

“The edible part consists of a compact terminal mass of greatly thickened, modified and partly developed flower structures together with the supporting fleshy stalks.”

As if this isn’t bad enough, it then goes on to say:

“This terminal cluster forms a white succulent ’curd’  when cultivated for the table.”

I know these are probably very accurate scientific terms but who wants to eat a compact terminal mass?  It sounds like a tumour.  And as for a white succulent curd….yecch!  Cauliflower was never my favourite vegetable but it’ll  be a long time before I eat it again.  A length of time that will correlate precisely with the amount of time it takes for me to forget the words “compact terminal mass” whenever I see one!

That’s about enough for today, will speak about the revolting recipes contained inside next post!

In the meantime, hoping you can  forget the phrase “compact terminal mass”  as quickly as possible.