Mushroom Leek Quiche (GAPS-friendly)

As promised!

This recipe was based on Julia Child's version of Flamiche - Quiche Aux Poireaux. It is SO rich that one small slice is enough to fill me completely up and zaps any sugar craving for about two days. I increased her original recipe again by a half (give or take a little here and there) to fill a deep-dish 9" pan. I also cooked it a bit longer and at a lower temperature for the sake of the coconut flour in the crust. Also, I chopped the mushrooms to make it more child-friendly, but I needn't have bothered since she didn't like it anyway. Next one I'll slice them.

Also, the coconut flour crust browns way too easily. Ours got very brown, even though I covered it with foil half-way. Here is a possible solution that I have not tried, but might work - end the crust at the level of the pie, possibly adding the pie crust edge with 12 minutes to spare on the baking. Let me know if that works.

Mushroom Leek Quiche

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Ingredients

Pie crust:

• 1/2 cup sifted coconut flour
• 1/2 cup flaked coconut
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup ghee or butter, melted
• pinch salt

Beat the eggs. Slowly pour in the ghee while stirring so as not to cook the eggs. Add the rest of the ingredients, finishing it with your hands when it's too thick for a spoon. See here for more information on how to roll out a coconut flour crust. 

Before making the filling, spread a thin layer of cheese at the bottom of the pie crust.

Filling:

• about 3 1/2 cups sliced, cleaned white of leek 
• about 1 cup chopped or sliced mushrooms
• 1/2-3/4 cup water
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 4 Tb butter or ghee
• 4 eggs
• 2 cups coconut cream or milk
• pinch nutmeg
• 1/2-3/4 cup grated goat jack cheese (Swiss would be nice, but we can only do goat's or sheep's milk, so it wasn't an option for us)
• 1 Tb ghee, cut into pea-sized dots

After slicing the leeks, submerge in a bowl of cold water to clean out the dirt that collects between the layers.  Boil them over moderately high heat with water, salt and ghee until the liquid is partly evaporated.  Add the mushrooms. Cook until the liquid is almost evaporated, then turn the heat down to simmer, cover the pan and stew gently for 20-30 minutes until very tender and aromatic.

Beat eggs, coconut cream and seasonings in a big mixing bowl to blend. Slowly add the mushrooms and leeks bit by bit so as not to cook the eggs. (Julia suggests at this point that you taste to check the seasoning.) Pour into the pie shell and distribute the rest of the cheese and ghee over the top.

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until puffed. (Ours didn't brown, presumably because of the lower temperature. In our case, a knife came out wet but more or less clean at the end.)

Pie Crust Revealed!

Coconut flour has a few qualities to it that make it more difficult to work with and one or two that make it easier. It doesn't bind well to itself like wheat flours do. It's also not starchy. For those reasons, it tends to crack and requires a lot of eggs to hold it together. It's dehydrated. It's also a fat-based material, which means that melted fats moisten it much better than water-based liquids. It tends to have the consistency of a rich pound cake when thick, or when thin, like a crispy, very delicate cracker.  Dryer breads work well as crusts for pizza or pie. Moister versions work well as pancakes or pan breads. 

I've usually found that coconut bread texture actually improves with refrigeration.

Because of many of these factors, it's also a crust that does well with patching, which is good, considering how easy it cracks.

This was actually the bottom crust to our pumpkin pie, which was not deep-dish. On a deep-dish pie pan the crust needs to be a little thinner than in this case. Either way, this is the technique I've found works. 

The top to the apple pie was my first attempt at it. It went surprisingly well, but I still don't have quite enough to document that process yet. 

More on Apple Pie

After wondering how I should post this recipe, I thought that I should, first, discuss the recipes I used to make this pie...both are questionable, in my opinion, although each has some good points, too. Then after tomorrow's event when the pies are cut and eaten, I'll get responses and will then post the recipe if the responses are good. Otherwise, it's back to the drawing board!

The first apple pie recipe is the one I learned from a friend as a teenager. It's a classic apple pie that's full of sugar, corn starch and spiced well with cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. We'd spend the first half of a day peeling, coring and slicing apples to make two or three pies. It was a recipe that made the best of the sudden bounty of apples in the fall on the East Coast. It was my friend who taught me that a few pears give the pie a lot of depth, and also that the number of apples used in most recipes is never enough. Unfortunately, if I removed all the sugar and the corn starch, there's not much left to it.

The second recipe is Bruce Fife's from his Cooking With Coconut Flour, which you might have noticed has been my go-to cookbook for a while. I made a double basic crust. I added pears. I used more raisins than he called for and substituted a smaller amount of maple syrup with his called-for 1/4 teaspoon of liquid stevia for sweetness. This is a pie that will be shared, and will be eaten by a group that has some kids and adults with gluten intolerance and Celiac's Disease. There are some who are vegetarians and a few who are dairy-free because of ideology, not medical necessity. A very few of the families also cook with Weston A. Price in mind. For those reasons, I chose to use ghee. I could have tried some gelatin in the apples, but I decided that it was both more work than necessary and also would have meant that an awful lot of the people at this event tomorrow would refuse to eat it.

The crust is very challenging. Coconut flour does not hold together well, so, as you can see from the picture, it's pretty rocky near the edges. It also browns very quickly, so I'm a bit concerned about the state of the crust inside. On the other hand, it bakes up so fast that it's probably fine. I nearly prebaked it, but the recipe called for it to be raw going in. So that's what I did.

Fife only calls for four apples. I'm wondering what size pie shell he has. Twice that barely filled this deep-dish version. Also, I left off all thickeners - I discovered that while stirring the filling that it thickened just fine on it's own. I also added a few teaspoonfuls of ghee which will make it thicken a bit when chilled. Then, as a compromise towards aesthetics (coconut flour crusts are not that pretty) and for a bit more sweet, I did sprinkle a bit of unprocessed sugar on the top - barely 1/4 teaspoon.

So that's the story of this pie. Please send both it and me some good thoughts for tomorrow!

And now...pumpkin pie.

Curried Drop Biscuits With Beef

Last night we thoroughly enjoyed our savory stew after all that birthday food. After days of making stuff for our daughter's big day, it was time to make stuff for me. I was in the mood for something like bread, so I made some therapeutic biscuits. These are based on one of Bruce Fife's recipes.

Curried Drop Biscuits With Beef

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1/4 cup ghee, melted

1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds

1 2" turmeric root, peeled and grated (Or 1 teaspoon dried turmeric)

1 clove garlic, minced

1 teaspoon coriander powder

3/8 teaspoon (1/4+1/8, that is) sea salt (if you don't like salty food, go down to 1/4 teaspoon)

1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/4 cup precooked ground beef

1/3 cup sifted coconut flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Melt ghee in small frying pan. Pour out all but enough to fry the spices. Under low to medium heat fry the mustard with the cumin seeds until they just start to pop. Add grated turmeric and garlic, turn down heat, blend well. Add coriander, pepper and salt. Blend and take off heat. 

Blend together the eggs and the unspiced ghee. Slowly add the spice mix, very slowly if it's hot, whisking as you go. Add the baking powder to the coconut flour and add together, mixing well. Fold in the beef. Drop by spoonfuls onto a pan covered with parchment paper. Bake at 400 degrees F for 15 minutes. 

These turned out especially well because the beef had all kinds of lovely vegetables in it, as well...

Bleh. Babycakes NYC frosting, er, sauce.

It doesn't seem to matter how I make it, or what I substitute. It just NEVER turns out to be more than some kind of sauce. Which is what it is...and like many foods made for vegan eaters it's waaaaay too sweet, not to mention it has rice milk and rice milk powder (yuck and more yuck!) in it. So the cake was au naturel, double decker with banana slices between, but with the sauce on each piece and fancy birthday candles, it went fine. As usual, I don't get to taste it, but I had reports that it was good.

So, a good, nutrient-dense, not too sugary frosting anyone? I used to make an amazing frosting from blended dates and coconut oil, but this year Little Moo wanted pink. So pink, she got.

I have a feeling that I'll have to figure out a real buttercream thing for next year, assuming that she can eat it by then...I wonder if you can make buttercream icing out of ghee...?

Sorry - the party was completely crazy and I didn't get any pictures. :(

I'll post the images I took of them cooling last night...