Kitchen Experiments : Quiche Bhurjiwala

How would it be if a French monsieur et mademoiselle got married at an Indian mahal, complete with the all the naach-gaana, mirch-masala that is the 'jaan' of Indian weddings? Something like that was the latest culinary experiment a la maison - Quiche Bhurjiwala - a union of 2 classic French dishes, Quiche Lorraine and Poatoes Dauphinoise - with a liberal sprinkling of Indian chutzpah.

The experiment was a result of long-held longing to make a tart/pie/quiche. The idea of a pastry shell holding any amount of varied treasures within had been gnawing at my brain for months. The possibilities! They seemed endless - savoury pies, sweet tarts - should I make a pie with kadhai paneer inside? Or whip up a delicious sweet one with voluptuous custard instead?
Finally, after ages, the stars and planets aligned in the right positions and I remembered to buy the eggs for the pie. (Being a predominantly vegetarian household emans eggs are not a staple in the fridge). Luckily, mes parents obligingly went out in the afternoon, giving me free reign of the kitchen (unbeknownst to them, of course!)

The basic Quiche Lorraine recipe I referred to was Rachel Allen's (seen on her very nice TV show, 'Bake'). But keeping Mom's sage words in mind, I decided to halve the quantity of the ingredients (In case the recipe turns to be a big fiasco, there is minimum waste to feel forlorn about!) - and there came the first obstacle.

I am not a serious cook and though my Mom is, she doesnt have things like thermometers and weighing scales lying around in her kitchen. How the hell was I to measure 50 gms of buttter and 100 gms of flour? And precise quantities are a MUST in baking, as warned by the Queen of no-fuss cooking herself, Nigella Lawson (who otherwise doesnt bother with weights et al)
I decided to go with eye and with a prayer on my lips, I scooped out butter that looked like half a 100 gms pack. Holding a half-full 200gms bottle of honey in one hand, I hed a cupful of flour (maida) in the other and because they felt to be about the same weight, assumed that the cupful of flour was 100 gms. You can see what a scientific disposition I have.

After making the shortcrust pastry (wherein I added some atta - wholweat flour at the end because the pastry looked too buttery - quelle horreur!) and dumping it in the fridge, I was faced with making the filling.

Now, the classic Quiche Lorraine has eggs, cream(lots of it!), bacon, onions, parsley, chives and cheese (again, lots of it!). Now I already was guilt-ridden by how buttery the pastry was, so I skipped the cheese in the filling. Also, I didnt have parsley, bacon or chives - so decided to centre the filling around the Indian bhurji (spicy scrambled eggs), and subsituted them with coriander/cilantro, carrot and garlic. And added a chopped green chilli for good measure. :)

I briefly cooked the garlic, diced onion, carrot (diced in small cubes, like bacon lardons) and chilli with some butter and added some fried chicken seasoning (its not made of chicken, its just a blend of salt and spices which echoes the umami atste of meat)

On the other side, I whipped one egg and one egg yolk and added the (gulp!) 100-odd mls of cream and more of the chicken seasoning.

By now, the pastry had enough time to slightly set in the fridge - and there I faced another roadblock - we do not have a small enough baking pan/tart tin. We have large cake pans but nothing even remotely close to a 6-inch pie tin. Considering I had used carrot instead of bacon, I decided to go the whole hog and use a small frying pan instead (Sorry,Mom!)

I rolled out the patry, flipped it into the pan to blind-bake it - and there!-another deviation from the recipe was forced on me - I do not have the kind of cling film thatcan be used in an oven. Mine said (in bold and caps) - DO NOT USE IN OVENS OR MICROWAVE OVENS WITH CONVECTION HEATING. How could I now place the beans (used as a weight, so that the pastry doesnt puff and rise) onto the pastry to blind-bake it? Luckily, I was on a roll where ingenuity was concerned, and I made do with a lot of stackable brass vessels (heavy enough!) which I dumped onto the pastry and baked it in our cranky old oven till it looked done (no timer or temperature controls on our oven!)

When the pastry looked about cooked, I brushed it with some egg white (leftover from the single yolk - waste not, want not!) and spread out the onion-carrot filling. Which looked very lonely and woebegone in the pastry, there was so little of it. I did NOT have the patience to rustle up another batch of the filling and this is where Potatoes Dauphinoise stepped in. I simply sliced a boiled-andpeeled potato and fanned out the slices on top of the filling.

Sprinkled some salt-and-pepper, poured the egg and cream mixture,

and baked it for 20 minutes till the patry looked a wonderful golden colour (I remembered just in the nick of time that since the ingredients were halved, the cooking time would be reduced too - else I would have serenely waited for the stipulated 40 minutes and would have been faced with cinderblock charred pastry - shudder!)

And would you believe it - with the kind of liberties I had taken with the recipe- the quiche slid out as easily from the pan as a hot knife through butter? And that, except for being a little low on salt, the quiche tasted yummy? And that the pastry was oh-so-good, in a crumbly, buttery way, with no soggy patches at all?

French chefs might be spinning in their graves (or fainting in their kitchens)- but what the hell, Quiche Bhurjiwala was a success as far as this Indian almost-cook is concerned. :)