Gluten free quiche

Don't you love when taking what seems to be the harder road turns out to be easier and better than the tried and true, easier, one?

When I first started experimenting with gluten free baking (and cooking) it certainly wasn't a choice. It's just slightly harder than regular baking and somehow those one or two extra steps seem to make a huge mental difference.  Also, balancing the proportions is more difficult and the result is slightly less regular. I like to bake, though, and I like a challenge, so I've persevered.

I also like quiche.  A lot.  Now, pie crust can be a bit tricky, but mostly my reservations have always revolved around the keep-it-in-the-fridge waiting period.  When I want my crust, I want it now!  And this was even before the gluten-free days.  Needless to say, quiche hasn't ever been part of my repertoire.  Rather, it's been something that I save for special occasions.  I'll break it out for a Boxing Day lunch, or a girls day out brunch. 

But then, oooh, but then.... Buried deep into a message board discussing easy gluten free lunches, was a recipe.  An easy recipe.  A fast recipe.  Dare I say it?  It's even a healthy recipe.

The crust is made from chickpea flour and olive oil.  The recipe suggests blending it in a blender, but that's too much mess for me so I simply use my pastry cutter and it works just great.  An even easier alternative, if you don't have a pastry cutter, would be just using a couple of knives to cut it.  Then, you press it into the pan, bake it up for a few minutes and presto!  You've got pie crust.  While I don't think that this would work for sweeter fare, here the savory flavour meshes perfectly with whatever herbs I happen to toss into the filling.

Throw in the fact that, in addition to being delicious for supper, it's filling enough that there's always leftovers for lunch the next day.  It's become one of my favorite go-to quick meals. 

Put a bird on it, or, belated merry Christmas to me

The Dutch start the holiday season early*. As it's not really the point of this post, I won't go into detail (but if you'd like to know more, you can follow up at Wikipedia), but suffice to say, it all begins in late November. The overeating, the festive spirit, small children constantly bordering on expectant hysteria....and....the gift giving. We celebrate with the Man's family, and this year we went traditional. We set a maximum price and then everyone drew names, made a list and went away for a year.

I drew the Man's aunt, who has excellent and exacting taste, which made me both a little bit nervous and, oddly, also set me at ease. I could figure out, more or less, what she would like; I just wasn't sure that I would be able to find it for the price range we had set ourselves. Before leaving the house, I narrowed down her list to the two things that I thought that I could probably manage to find; namely a nicely decorated wooden kitchen paper towel holder, and a wind chime. I'll admit - the wind chime I got. The paper towel holder, though, notsomuch. Still, I looked, and I looked, and I looked and everywhere I found expensive wind chimes. And I found plain wooden holders. And nice metal holders. But no attractive, wooden, paper towel holders. Lord knows, I looked and looked.

In all of this searching, though, I also found buried at the back of a quirky little store, the paper towel holder of my dreams. When I first spied it, I thought it was lovely, but not quite what the Aunt would have wanted. It wasn't wood, it wasn't painted. Still, I'd keep going back to look at it. And then, finally, I found a nice wind chime. Thank goodness. Sinterklaas was saved! I stopped thinking about paper towel holders and moved on to Christmas gifts for the Man and the Toddler. Apparently, it stuck in my head though, because when I opened my gifts on Christmas morning, I was secretly a little bit sad that it wasn't one of my presents; this despite the fact that I hadn't really even hinted at it.

Today, when I was riding past the store, I noticed that they were having a post-Christmas sale and, as if some other force was controlling me, I found myself walking in and buying it.

We've been watching the Portlandia series (which I highly recommend) and the moment the Man saw it in the kitchen, the very first thing out of his mouth was "Put a bird on it".