By Request - Mini Quiches

Remember me talking about how I don't measure? Well this was one of those times. I made them last Thursday night for a High Tea I was going to on Friday morning. I promised my friend I would make something to contribute then forgot all about it til the last minute. So I perused my ingredients stash and came up with these. I had planned to make mini quiches or something similar anyway. I was just lucky I already had the ingredients.

So here's my impromptu recipe:

Ingredients ( From what I remember) Makes 24

• 2 sheets of pre rolled puff pastry
• 4 eggs
• 1/4 cup of milk
• 4 or 5 cherry tomatoes diced
• A couple of tablespoons of fresh thyme
• Grated cheese
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Method

1. Using a small glass or cookie cutter, cut 24 circles from the puff pastry sheets. They need to be big enough to shape into a pie case in a mini muffin pan. I think I got about 9 out of each square of pastry then had to re-roll the scraps.
2. Whisk together the eggs and milk. Then add the tomatoes, thyme and salt and pepper
3. Spoon the mixture into the prepared pastry
4. Add a couple of pieces of grated cheese to the top of each quiche. They're so tiny I didn't add the cheese to the mixture because more than a couple of pieces of cheese in each one would make them too cheesy.
5. Bake at 200 degrees C until firm.

Of course there are lots of other things you could add. A bit of ham would have been nice and maybe some spring onions, but these were really simple and delicious.

I also made another 24 cases with a different filling. Not an egg filling but these were yummy too.

Filling ingredients:

• 250g creamed cheese
• 1/4 cup thickened cream
• About 4 tablespoons of chopped spinach
• 1 sachet of dried cream of chicken soup mix
• Salt and pepper

These ones got eaten really quickly so they must have been good.

Enjoy!

Love Kylie

A Few of My Favourite Things

Harrison - and the rest of my family and friends but especially Harrison. There is just nothing like the love I feel for him. I love him snot, dirt and all. Now that I have him I can finally understand the way my mother feels about me. This wasn't meant to get all emotional and mushy so lets get on with it shall we.
Orange blossoms - They're just starting to bloom and I love them. Not only are they pretty but they smell delicious. The best thing is our orange tree is right next to our clothesline so the smell makes hanging out the washing almost enjoyable. Note I said almost. I can't think of anything that would make it fun save watching someone else do it.

My camera - It's a Nikon D60 and I've only had it for a few months. I don't claim to be the worlds greatest photographer but I like to practice. Take the above picture for instance. Looks like a bunch of twigs right? Well essentially it is, but to me it's practice. A very generous friend let me borrow her 70-300mm f4-5.6 lens. It doesn't autofocus on my camera so I was practicing manually focusing. True I could have chosen more interesting subject matter but these twigs were really far away and that, in itself was cool. To me. At the time.

Baking - I do so much of it I have to love it. I made these little mini quiches for a high tea I attended on Friday morning. They were completely impromptu (I remembered Thursday night I was supposed to be making something something) and turned out great. Thank goodness because I didn't have time to make anything else.

I'm sure that there are many many more, but right now today, these are my favourite things.

Love Kylie

Vege Quiche

I have to say, the one thing I really should have considered when I decided that I was going to blog some recipes was that I'd have to measure. Me? Measure? So many times I've taken pictures of things I've cooked and gotten all excited about posting the pictures and recipes of this yummy food and then realised I have no idea exactly what quantities of ingredients I put in it. How am I supposed to post a recipe? It's not like I can get on here and type 'well just throw in a dash of A and about so much of B. So this morning when I decided to make this quiche I made sure to pay attention to what I put into it. And TA DA, we have a recipe.

It's not really a traditional quiche, more like a mutation of a quiche since it doesn't have any crust to speak of and I cook it in a lasagna dish, but it's the way I do it and it's yum!

Ingredients:

• 3 Zucchini's grated
• 2 carrots grated
• 1 onion finely chopped
• 1 small red capsicum diced
• 2 tomatoes diced
• 1 cup of grated cheese (any kind of tasty hard cheese)
• 1 cup of self raising flour
• 1/3 cup of olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• 3 egg whites
• 4 eggs

Now I forgot about the cheese and the onion when I took the picture but as long as you don't forget to put them in the quiche you'll be OK. I like to add some corn kernels as well but I didn't have any.

Something else to note it, the reason I used egg whites is because I had left over from a salad dressing I made. Normally I would just used 6 whole eggs.

OK, I think that's it. Moving on..........

Method:

1. Mix the veges and cheese together in a large bowl
2. Next, add the flour and salt and pepper and stir it through making sure to coat everything in the flour
3. Mix the olive oil through
4. And now the eggs
5. Mix it all up with a wooden spoon making sure all the ingredients are well combined
6. Line a lasagna dish with baking paper and pour the mixture in. (Baking paper is my saviour. It's so much easier to line everything with baking paper than to grease the dish only to have something stick anyway. Plus, it makes washing up alot easier.)
7. Bake at 180 degrees C for approx 45 Min's

It's that easy and great for lunch boxes.

Enjoy!

Love Kylie

A Small Confession

Sssshhhh, don't tell anyone but I actually enjoy mowing the lawn. Does that make me crazy? I have friends who've never even started a lawn mower and they sure think I'm mad but there's just something therapeutic (and maybe a little obsessive compulsive) about seeing those nice neat lines on the lawn when I'm done.

Do you know what the best thing about it is?
The kids can't run out into the yard and make the grass grow by running on it. So I'll take cutting the grass over cleaning the house any day.

A Bit from the Bush

Like I mentioned in my previous post, every winter holidays while the older kids go to their Mum's, Dan and I toddle off to spend a couple of weeks at our bush getaway. It's in one of the wettest places in the country so normally it's freezing, raining and dismal but this year we were blessed with fantastic weather. Sunshine every day and we even managed to wear shorts without freezing our butts off!

Since we only get there once a year it's always terribly overgrown and we spend almost the whole time we're there on the brush cutter slashing back the guinea grass while getting eaten alive by mossies and having our legs carved up by those horrible, prickly, feral wild raspberry bushes. The fruit is lovely but if you've ever had the pleasure of dealing with the bush you'll know what I mean.

But...........

This year we had this!

Oh yeah baby!! *sings 'She thinks my tractor's sexy.......'* (I don't really but I get that stupid song stuck in my head every time I see one. Needless to say I was singing it alot these holidays.)

This dinky little tractor with a slasher on the back saved us hours and hours of backbreaking brush cutting and Dan cleared the whole area in a couple of days. The best investment we ever made!

So with the work out of the way we had time to play. We took Harrison to the Malanda show. He loved seeing all the animals.

He especially loved the cows.How could you not? Check out these beautiful bovine creatures.

Dan's family have a beach house at Russell Heads so we spent a day there too. Geez it was hard going. What an horrible place hey?
Other than that, we did alot of relaxing. I took at couple of trips to the nearest town to shop up a storm. I replenished my scrapbooking supplies because I needed to. And bought some new clothes of course.

By then end of the trip as usual I was eager to get home. Can you believe I was actually bored? A rare and unusual phenomenon. But damn it felt good.

Here are a few more pics. Enjoy!

One foggy morning.....The only picture of me from the whole trip and I had to take it myself.Our humble hideawayHarrison pretending to drive the tractor
A tea plantation on the tablelands
Those pesky wild raspberries. Harrison ate hundreds!Look who I found lurking on our car tyre on day
This poor butterfly must have been at deaths door to be so obliging to a curious little boy and an amateur photographer
The Langoleers are coming! And that's all I have to say about that.

Love Kylie

And You Thought I'd Abandoned You

I'm Back!! Long story short, I've had no internet access for the past couple of weeks. We've been on a break in the bush. I meant to make a post before we went away but technology failed me and I didn't get the chance.
I hope you can forgive me. I'll try not to let it happen again.
I'll be back tomorrow with more.