Quiche Lorraine with French Salad Dressing

Life is always busy towards the end of the year! 

This week we celebrate my daughter's graduation from high school and my son's 14 years old birthday.  There is a lack of sleep trying to be the best mum I can from picking up my daughter from graduation party at 1am in the morning and baking a cake for my son at 10pm at night. The following month would be even busier with a family holiday and visit from families for Christmas. 

This is another inspiration from my daughter of the French salad dressing after her French trip. I have several attempts to try to make it to her liking.  The dressing is light and full of flavour, great for quiche and salad for the coming "hot summer".

Enjoy!

Quiche Lorraine 

Ingredients:

For the butter shortcrust pastry:
250g plain flour
125g salted butter, cold and diced
2 eggs
2 tablespoons cold water

For the filling:
200g diced ham
4 eggs
200ml thickened cream
50g grated cheese
salt and pepper
nutmeg

For the French dressing:
juice of half a lemon
1 gloves of garlic
1 teaspoon of finely chopped onion
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
olive oil
salt to taste

Method:

1. For the pastry: Blend the butter and flour in a blender in pulse motion till crumble, then add the eggs one by one and finally add the cold water.  Keep blending till it forms into dough.  Wrap the dough with glad wrap and fridge for at least 30 minutes or till it is harden. If you have a small blender, you may need to do it in two lots.
2. Roll the pastry between two sheets of non-stick baking paper to 24cm wide circle and about 5mm thick. You can put the left over pastry into the freezer for later use.
3. Place the pastry over the quiche pan and place a piece of baking paper over the top, then topped with baking beans. Blind bake for 10 minutes at 200c. Take off the baking beans and baking paper and brush the pastry with some egg white. 
4. Reduce the heat to 180c. Bake for a further 5-8 minutes or just before it starts to turn golden.
5. For the filling: Whisk the eggs with cream and cheese. Add in ham and flavour with nutmeg, salt and pepper.
6. Pour the filling mixture into the pastry case and bake for 25 minutes until is is golden. Serve with salad.
7. For the French salad dressing: Mix all ingredients together and add enough olive oil to make it a cloudy look rather than a creamy look.  If you want a creamy look, you can add some mayo into the dressing.

Potato Salad with Japanese Mayo and Pine Nuts

This is one of my new creation and I eat this as a light meal on my meatless day or serve as a side salad with burgers.  As I found that having a potato salad with just potato is too plain, by adding some greens into it adds more fibre and the pine nuts simply is a nice garnish with a bit of a crunch.  I choose to use Japanese Mayonnaise because it has a full flavour of whole egg, bears in mind though it has 80% of fat so don't over dressing it as I know it is hard not to!  My sister fed her fussy 2 years old with this salad and she just sat quietly and ate them all.

Potato Salad with Japanese Mayo and Pine Nuts

4-5 baby potatoes
a bowl of leafy mix (fancy lettuce, baby spinach leaves, rockets and beetroot leaves)
a small handful of pine nuts, toasted
Japanese Mayonnaise
salt and coarse black pepper to taste

Method:

1. Peel the skin of the potatoes (you can leave the skin if you wish) and cut into cubes.  Cook the potatoes cubes into boiling water until cooked.  If you can poke a fork into the cubes, it is ready.
2. Drain the water and leave the potatoes cool.  Rinse the leafy mix with water and drain as well.
3. Put the leafy mix and potatoes into a big bowl.  Add the pine nuts and mayo.  Seasoned with salt and coarse black pepper before serving.  Enjoy!

Purple Coleslaw

I like purple vegetable because of its colour and its health benefit.  We all suppose to eat a variety of fruit and vegetables with different colours everyday.  I am comfortable with some green, orange, red and yellow food such as Chinese vegetables, broccoli, green salad, carrot, pumpkin, sweet potato, corn, tomato and capsicum that we have all the time.  For the purple vegetable, I like to juice with purple carrot and beetroot, there are many ways to cook with eggplant and I work out the best way for purple cabbage is to make into coleslaw.  It really doesn't taste too much different than the other cabbage but it gives you a brighter colour of a dish!

Have you got any idea how to cook the purple or green cauliflower?
  
Purple Coleslaw


1/2 head of a small purple cabbage
1-2 apples
1 carrot
1/2 onion
low-fat mayonnaise
2 tablespoons or more Japanese mayonnaise

Method:

1. Shred the cabbage and soak it into some ice cold water to enhance crispiness.  Drain.
2. Cut apple and carrot into fine strips and cut onion into fine small pieces.
3. Mix all the cabbage, apple, carrot and onion in a large bowl, the add the low-fat mayonnaise and Japanese mayonnaise.  Toss through.  Add a bit more Japanese mayonnaise to enrich the creamy taste if needed. (I try to make it a low-fat salad, you can use normal mayonnaise if you wish.  Japanese mayonnaise is not low-fat so I only use a little)

Prawn Salad with Mango Mayonnaise

I made this salad a year ago before I started blogging.  I had this friend travelled a lot for work and he took some photos of the food he had when travelling first class in the plane.  The food served at first class was much better than the one I had when I travelled economy class.  As I probably don't have the chance travelling first class so I start making the dishes from his photos and  start cooking more and more western style food until I decide to challenge myself and start blogging about food.  Although I still haven't had the confidence in handling big chuck of meat such as roast leg of lamb and roast turkey etc., I am having more experience in using herbs and trying out new recipes.  What I like about this salad is that I do not put any salt and sugar into it and it tastes so fresh and natural.  My husband bought a tray of mango home the other day and I'd just love to make this salad again!

Prawn Salad with Mango Mayonnaise


fresh raw prawns
green salad
avocado
1 mango (1/2 sliced, 1/2 leave for mayonnaise)
1-2 tablespoons low fat mayonnaise
olive oil
paprika
pepper

Method:

1. Remove heads and shell from prawns, use a toothpick to remove the poo vein.  Heat oil in pan and pan fried the prawns until cooked, season with some pepper and paprika. 
2. Arrange salad onto the plate with mango and avocado then topped with cooked prawns.  Drizzle with some olive oil if wished. 
3. For the mayonnaise: Cut mango into dice and blend it with mayonnaise into a blender until smooth.  Drizzle the mango mayonnaise over the salad. 

Fresh Fruit Salad and Strawberry Smoothie

These fruit salad and smoothie are my favourite for breakfast or snack.  The strawberry season is nearly over so I have been adding blueberry and mango into my fruit salad instead.  By having a glass of smoothies in the morning, it gives me full energy to start the day.  It has been over a month since I have started going to the gym.  I've got my nice legs back and my bum is getting shaped.  But I have put on weight!  My trainer told me that muscle actually weight 5 time more than fat.  Some of my friends started training earlier than me, they all told me that they didn't lose weight but I could see that their figure were toned.  

October is the month for fundraising for breast cancer research.  I'm holding a pink luncheon at my restaurant for the parents at my kids class.  I am busily asking for donations for door prizes and getting people to come along.  The research indicates that 1 in 8 women are affected by breast cancer and early detection and regular examinations help increase survival rate.  For more information on Pink Ribbon Day, please click here.  You may know someone suffer from this terrible disease.  Maybe you would like to hold a fund raising and hopefully this can help to find a cure!

  

Fresh Fruit Salad


Ingredients:
Apple, orange, kiwi fruit, strawberries, passionfruit pulp (or lemon juice)

Cut all fruit except passionfruit into cube, then drizzle passionfruit pulp and stir through.  Serve with yoghurt and toasted muesli.

Strawberry Smoothie
(make 1 tall glass or 2 small glasses)

Ingredients:
3/4 cup organic milk
1-2 tablespoon organic yoghurt with wildberry
1 tablespoon honey
4-5 medium strawberries, hulled

Place all ingredients into the blender and blend for 15 seconds.  Pour into glass and serve straight away.


  

Apple and Celery Salad

This salad is also called Waldorf salad as it is named after the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.  I couldn't remember when was the first time I had this salad but I knew I didn't have it before migrating to Australia.  The only salad I had back then was potato salad and we still had that every time when we had a family BBQ.  You won't be surprise seeing that older Chinese won't touch any raw salad as they like their vegetable cooked.  My dad loves salad, considering him having his first raw salad at 50.  One time I was reading the book, Mao's Last Dancer and I couldn't stop laughing when the author mentioned that he was invited to have dinner with some western friends after coming to the US for dancing.  As he couldn't read English, for good manner sake, he only ordered the cheapest food on the menu and that was a salad.  He had never had salad before and it was not a filling meal for a young man.  Imagine going to a foreign place and you don't know the language, we can only use sign language and pictures to express ourselves.  The last time when I went to Japan, we went to a noodle house for dinner.  Even though I brought a traveller dictionary with me, I had to point to the picture of the menu and tried to tell the waitress what we wanted.  We ended up having 3 noodle soups for 4 people so we had to order one more later on.  I didn't think I got the noodle I wanted but I had to eat what I'd got by seeing the hopeless face of the waitress not understanding me.  Anyway, it was a nice dinner after all!  Have you got any interesting travelling story due to language barrier?
    
Apple and Celery Salad


1 apple
1 stalk of celery
1 tablespoon sultanas
a handful of walnut
few lettuce leaf
2 heap tablespoons low-fat mayonnaise
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Cut apple and celery into small cubes.  Squeeze some lemon juice over the apple to prevent discolour.  Add in sultanas, mayonnaise and salt to the salad.  Spoon salad over the plate with the lettuce base, then sprinkle some chopped walnut over the top.

Tips:  Use a vegetable peeler to peel off the tough bits from the celery.

Spring Salad

We all look for a fresh start for Spring, I make this salad using snow pea sprouts, pepitas, violet flowers and mandarin which is light and crispy to have for the warmer weather.

I have recently join the gym and starting a training program.  First my trainer measures all my "FAT" everywhere in my body and then he asks if I used to have nice legs.  Huh!  Honestly I'm not looking for losing weight, I wouldn't mind losing 2 kg and tone up a bit.  What I really want is to improve my overall fitness after a year long battling with illness.  Then he shows me the food chart of what I should be eating such as low GI, low fat, low sugar, plenty of greens and protein etc. I think he will be shocked reading my blog with all these cake and dessert recipes!  So from now on, I'm working on fitness food as I don't want to waste the effort on the workout.  I should co-operate with him and see if he can bring me back my "nice legs" and get rip of my muffin top.  Hahaha!

At the moment, I go to the gym 3 days a week for the work-out.  Once a week I go the yoga/pilates class which I enjoy a lot.  You get to stretch the muscle and joins that you don't use much.  My trainer doesn't allow me to go to other classes such as Zumba until I'm fitter.  On my free day, I may do extra walking or just have a rest.  My figure may not have changed much yet but I'm already feeling good for myself.  I keep asking myself: Why didn't I do that earlier?

I'm going to work on salad in September.  The best food to have after workout is to have a salad and plenty of water!

One of my friend from Hong Kong mentions that it will be easier for her if my blog is written in Chinese.  Instead of having a new blog, I'm going to add Chinese to the recipes starting from blog number 1, which is Apple & Cinnamon Muffins.  Hopefully this will attract more Chinese readers that are interested in western cooking.  Because I haven't written Chinese for so long, please excuse my slow progress.

Spring Salad


Ingredients:
Lettuce
red cabbage (sliced)
onion (sliced)
snow pea sprouts
pepitas
mandarin (skin and seed removed)
violets flower

Dressing:
Apple Cider Vinegar
2-3 Tbs low-fat mayonnaise
1 Tbs tomato sauce
1 Tbs low-fat Dijonnaise

Method:
Toss the lettuce, cabbage and onion in a bowl, add the sprouts and drizzle with some vinegar.  Mix the mayanise, tomato sauce and Dijon mayanisie and drizzle over the top.  Arrange the mandarin, flowers and sprinkle some pepitas over the top.       

Strawberry and Pecan Salad

When I think of strawberry, I always associate it to something sweet such as pancake, tart or shortcake.  Then I saw other bloggers making strawberry salad.  So I thought if you can put tomato into salad, strawberry should work as good as that!  I like this salad as it has the crisp of the lettuce, sweet and sour from the strawberry and tomato and the crunch from the pecan.  It is a good accompany to my seafood quiche.  

Strawberry and Pecan Salad

Ingredients:

strawberry

cherry tomato

lettuce

baby spinach leaves

cucumber

pecan nuts

apple cider vinegar

balsamic glaze

Method:

Wash and sliced the vegetables and fruit, chopped the pecan nuts.  Pour in the apple cider vinegar and then some balsamic glaze over the salad.  

Seafood Quiche

Prawn and Avocado Salad with Lebanese Bread

I got the idea of making this dish from the little cookbook "15 minutes gourmet" comes along with the March issue of the Australian Good Taste magazine.  I like the idea of using lebanese bread for the crouton.  It's a good way to use up the bread instead of making wrap.  I add in avocado and melted mozzarella cheese to the recipe to replace the bocconcini.  It is a warm salad with an autumn feel and it only take 15 minutes to prepare.

Prawn and Avocado Salad with Lebanese Bread

1 tablespoon wholegrain mustard
1 piece Lebanese bread
2 tomatoes
dried oregano
olive oil
minced garlic
10-12 raw prawns
80g leafy mix
1/4 red onion, sliced
1 avocado
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Italian Dressing:
1/4 cup vinegar
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
dried oregano
dried basil
pinch of salt

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 220c.  Spread the mustard over the bread and tear into pieces and place on the lined baking tray.  Bake for 5 minutes or until crisp.
2. Cut the tomato into wedges and sprinkled with dried oregano, garlic and olive oil.  Bake it in a separate tray with the bread together.
3. Heat oil in pan and pan fry the prawn till cooked.  Set aside.
4. Roughly mesh the avocado in a microwave safe bowl and add in mozzarella cheese, microwave it on high for 30 seconds or until the cheese melted.  Mix it with the cooked prawn immediately.
5. Put the leafy mix into a salad bowl, add in onion, tomato, prawns and the italian dressing.  Arrange the lebanese bread along the side of the bowl.