Vegan MoFo Day 13: Birthday Antics and Quiche

Oh my, I am a flake. I let two days go by without blogging. Shame on me. Here's what you missed:

Day 11 - Thursday
I celebrated my birthday (again) at Disneyland with the BF an my family. I had intended to eat vegan at the park, using this post from Adventures of an Average Vegan as my guide. Key word: intended. Fail. I was shamefully suffering the consequences of Wednesday night's birthday celebration, and I desperately craved dairy all day. I'm not proud of it, but I decided to eat only vegan the next day.

Day 12 - Friday
Everything I ate on Friday was vegan :) Even better, I made the "hard" dish for dinner - Asparagus Quiche with Tomatoes and Tarragon from Veganomicon. It was quite the adventure.

First, I made the pastry dough, using these ingredients:

I ended up using more water than the recipe called for, because the dough simply didn't stick together. It ended up fine. The hardest part of the whole dish was rolling out the dough. It was seriously labor intensive, as my working surface kept sliding around. I wish I had taken a picture of me doing this because it was pretty funny.

Since the dough had to sit in the fridge for at least an hour, I moved on to the filling. Sorry, I didn't take pictures of this either. I made a couple of boo-boos during this step.

First, my garlic was not really fresh, and I used it anyway. I honestly didn''t know if it's bad to use "bad" garlic. I figured we'd soon find out.

Then, I tried to multitask while I was sauteing the asparagus, shallots, and garlic. The asparagus and garlic turned out fine, but the shallots burned. I probably had enough to start over, but I decided not to.

Everything else turned out fine in terms of assembly. However, when I tasted a bit of the filling, it seemed like there was too much tarragon for my taste. Here's what it looked like before going into the oven:

The olive oil didn't drizzle so much as blob...

I baked it for 45 minutes, and let it cool for 20 minutes, as instructed. We were so hungry by then. I cut into it, and the filling was really soft, as it was when I spooned it in. So, I put it in the oven for another 30 minutes. This was probably a mistake, as the crust ended up really hard. Here's what it looked like after:

Not much different, huh

I was honestly not very optimistic that this would taste right. What I had previously tasted was strong on tarragon, and the fragrance was strong on garlic. (Seriously, is it bad to use bad garlic???) The recipe sounded so good, but I didn't think I had executed it quite right.

I apologetically served it to the BF and myself. Surprise - it tasted fantastic! The only thing that wasn't right was that the crust was definitely overcooked and very hard.

I was so relieved that we didn't die of poison or suffer indigestion from the bad garlic and the burned shallots!

I'm not sure if I would attempt this recipe again. At least not while I still consider myself a novice cook. It was very labor intensive. If/when I do try it again, I would love to do them in ramekins as individual quiches.

go here.