Category Archives: olives

An even better quiche recipe

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Real men don’t eat quiche. Real men eat vegan quiche, then do the washing up followed by giving their partners a back massage.

This is a superior quiche to this one.

A lot of the heavy lifting steps in this recipe can be done ahead of time, indeed the pastry needs to be made ahead of time and refrigerated for while. The cauliflower can also be roasted a day or two ahead if you happen to using the oven already.

In:

  • 1 batch Shortcrust pastry
  • 1 batch Scrambled breakfast tofu
  • 300 g cauliflower, chopped into small florets
  • Handful of green beans, finely diced
  • 1 medium onion, finely sliced
  • 1 tomato, sliced fairly thinly
  • 1 cup chickpea flour
  • 1.5 cups water
  • 2 tabs of light miso
  • handful of your favourite olives (de-stoned if necessary) and sliced
  • 2 or 3 (semi) sundried tomatoes, chopped
  • Olive oil

Do:

Dissolve the miso into the water. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, miso water, 2 tbsp of the oil. Cover and let it sit for a few hours or overnight. There’s no need to refrigerate it – in fact…just don’t. The keen eyed will note that this step is based on a Soccatta mix.

Once the Soccatta mix is ready…Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Roast the cauliflower. Place in a bowl with a splash of olive oil and coat well. Place on a baking tray and bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes until softened and slightly charred. Put to one side.

Whilst roasting, add a teaspoon of oil to a pan and fry the onions for about 3 minutes until they start to caramelise. Meanwhile, put a small saucepan of water on to boil.

Once the water is at a rolling boil add the chopped beans and blanche quickly. Drain and cool them with cold, running water. We want them still slightly crunchy.

Line an oiled quiche dish with pastry, prick the bottom and bake blind for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and prepare the filling.

In a large bowl (or use one of the saucepans if big enough) combine the cauliflower, beans, olives, sundried tomatoes, onions, and scrambled tofu. Toss until fairly evenly mixed.

Add everything from that bowl into the pastry shell and gently smooth down until fairly even. Pour the the flour mix over as evenly as possible. Top with the sliced tomatoes.

Bake for 20 minutes. Remove from oven, brush with a little olive oil, place in the oven for a further 5 minutes.

Allow to cool before serving.

Kitchen Note: If you don’t have one of those quiche dishes where the sides can be removed separately from the bottom despair not. The shortcrust pastry has a tendency to shrink slightly so will almost always smoothly pull back from the edges during cooking. Lightly oil the quiche dish if in doubt.

Spinach and Olive Soccattata

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Soccattata is a termed coined by vegan blogger Erin Wyso. The recipe below is from her blog and it’s delightful. The word is a combination of the words socca, an unleavened, savory pancake made of chickpea flour, and ttata, from frittata, the Italian dish much like an omelette or quiche.  This meal turned out to be a huge hit.  Veghead and Spinneychick loved it, as did the larger loinfruit, LeStrange.  The smaller loinfruit, KarateKid, said that he wouldn’t run a mile for it, but that he would tolerate it on rare occasions, perhaps once yearly.  Oh well. He’ll just have to have something else when the rest of us are eating such a delicacy.  I bet he’d ask for something like baked beans.  Such heresy.  How anyone could pass up a meal that has spinach, sliced chiffonade, is beyond me.  I have taken a shine to that word and I feel that I may have to use it far more often.

INGREDIENTS
1 cup chickpea flour
1 1/2 cups water
1 tspn salt
2 tabs olive oil
1/2 red onion, cut into thin half-moon slices
1 tab oil cured olives, depitted and roughly chopped
2 tabs sundried tomatoes, roughly chopped
2/3 cup spinach, cut chiffonade (a posh word for sliced very thinly) (you can also use Warrigal greens if you like – we did)
olive oil for frying

METHOD
In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, water, salt and oil. Cover and let it sit for a few hours or overnight. There’s no need to refrigerate it.

In a small 9-inch cast iron pan, heat a few tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Add in the sliced onions and sauté for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting and let the onions caramelize for about 30 minutes (don’t stir the onions as they caramelize). Fifteen minutes into your caramelizing time, preheat your oven to 205°C.

After the onions are caramelized and your oven is preheated, increase the heat under your cast iron pan to high. Add in the olives, tomatoes and spinach to the pan with a couple tablespoons of oil. Sauté until the spinach is reduced a bit, then add about two cups of the chickpea/water mixture to the pan. It should sizzle immediately. Place the entire cast iron pan into the oven and bake for about 20 minutes, or until it slightly browns around the edges.

Delish!