83 Vegetarian quiche with goat’s cheese

To be honest, I never thought about trying to make quiche before. It seemed odd to me, eating a savoury pie. But then, since me and my boyfriend have decided to try vegetarian diet for a while, I started to look for more and more new recipes. As a vegetarian, my choices had suddenly become much more limited, especially when eating out. Last Wednesday, I was in London (as always on Wednesday) and I simply searched for ‘best vegetarian restaurants in London’ online. We found one and decided to give it a go.
The concept of a restaurant was to serve about 40 different dishes at the same time, in a form of a buffet. Both of us, starving after a long day, packed our plates with as many dishes as possible. My boyfriend, in an attempt of being adventurous, decided to try the quiche. And guess what, it turned out to be just lovely!
As always, when I like something I’ve eaten in a restaurant, I always try to recreate it at home. A week later, I gave it a go and made my own quiche, adding the ingredients I liked. My boyfriend devoured it all, so I suppose it must have been quite tasty ^^

VEGETARIAN QUICHE WITH GOAT’S CHEESE

INGREDIENTS
for the crust
300g plain wheat flour
140g cold butter
cold water (approx. 8-9 tbsp)

for the filling
30g butter
300ml milk
25g plain wheat flour
2 eggs
1 courgette, diced
80g green beans, cut in 2cm pieces
2 garlic cloves
1 small green pepper
5-6 baby plum tomatoes
1 log full-fat goat’s cheese
fresh thyme
freshly ground pepper
salt

HOW TO MAKE?
1. Prepare the pastry. Add the flour onto the pastry board and then butter. Chop the butter with a knife, into small pieces. Add water and quickly knead a dough. Grease a pastry tin with butter. Roll out the pastry until it’s big enough to fill the pastry tin (sides included). Using your rolling pin, moved rolled out pastry into the baking tin and make sure it’s laid out nicely. Put the tin with pastry in the fridge and chill for about 20 min.
2. Start preheating the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
3. Bake the pastry. To do so, first prick the base with a fork. Second, cover the pastry with a piece of baking parchment and add baking beans. That’ll make our pastry base nicely shaped and flat. Bake for about 20 minutes. After that time take the paper and beans off and return to the oven for another 7-10 minutes, until it gets nicely golden. Take out of the oven and let it cool.

4. Prepare all the veg. Cut them all in fairly small pieces. Chop the garlic. Cut the tomatoes in half and goat’s cheese into slices.
5. Melt the butter in a small saucepan. When melted, throw the garlic in. Let it cook for about a minute, then add the rest of the vegetables (apart from the tomatoes, those we will use later). Add fresh thyme, some pepper and salt. Let it all cook for about 5 minutes.
6. When the veg is cooking, add the flour to the milk and mix it together, until incorporated.
7. After 5 minutes (or when the vegetables soften), pour the milk and flour mixture over the sieve into the saucepan with veg. Sieve will help you to get rid of any lumps. The mixture will thicken quite fast, so you need to keep stirring it, to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Add some more thyme, pepper and salt. Taste and see if it needs more seasonings.

8. When the mixture is sauce-like thick, take it off the heat and let it cool for about 5 minutes, stirring often to prevent skin forming on the surface.
9. In the separate bowl, beat the eggs with a hand whisk and mix them into the vegetable and milk sauce.
10. Pour everything into the baked pastry case.

Place the tomatoes and goat’s cheese on top.

Bake for about 40-45 minutes, until the filling is set. Wait about 10 minutes after taking out of the oven, take out of the tin and enjoy. Tastes great hot or cold.