Playing around on Easter. No words.
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© 2014-2017 Judy Wright. All rights reserved. Photos and text may only be used with written consent.
Last year, our friends, Maribeth and Michael, hosted an impromptu and festive Easter Brunch. I volunteered to bring something eggy. The morning of the brunch, I looked at what I had in the fridge: eggs, cheese, and bacon, with green onions and kale growing in the backyard. I decided on quiches. 
I had a Trader Joe’s pie crust in the freezer. All I needed from the grocery store was heavy cream. Easy-peasy. It doesn’t take much to make a quiche which is just a mixture of custard (eggs and cream), cheese, vegetables, bacon if desired, and pie crust. You can easily make do with what you have on hand: mushroom and onion, spinach and goat cheese, tomato and corn, whatever you have in the fridge. This week, I went for the kale and green onion version because once again, I had both growing in my winter garden.
The kale and green onions wintered-over under hoops covered with agricultural fabric as I described here.
Yield: This recipe makes 2 single-crust quiches.
Ingredients:
2 9 inch pie crusts (I love Trader Joe’s frozen pie crusts)
1 pound of bacon, crumbled
1 cup sliced green onions
1 cup chopped kale or spinach
1 cup Swiss cheese, shredded
1 cup Gruyere cheese, shredded
10 large eggs, beaten with a fork or blender
4 cups whole milk (ok), or half-and-half (better), or heavy cream (best!)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
a pinch or two of freshly ground nutmeg
Mise en Place:
To prepare bacon:
Here’s an easy way to cook a pound of bacon without making a mess. Preheat oven to 375º. Place a sheet of parchment paper or foil on a 13 x 18-inch baking pan. Set the bacon on a cooling rack and place it over the lined baking pan. Cook bacon for about 15 minutes, or until golden brown. When done, throw parchment paper in the trash as soon as it is cool enough to handle, before it has a chance to stick to the bottom of the pan. No messy splatter to deal with or dirty pans.
Wash and slice green onions. Wash, spin, and chop kale leaves.
Instructions for putting it all together:
Preheat oven to 425º.
To make the custard: beat eggs together first and then add cream, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
Place a single pie crust in each pie plate. Flute edges to make them look pretty. If using Trader Joe’s brand, keep the plastic wrap on the crust while you roll it out and transfer it from the countertop to the pie plate.
Layer pie ingredients as follows:
Bacon
Onions and Kale
Cheese
Egg Mixture
Bake pies at 425º to ensure that the pie crusts cook. Undercooked, doughy crusts are not very appetizing. After 20 minutes, lower the oven temperature to 350º to cook the custard interior. When you reduce the heat, take pies out of the oven and line their edges with foil or pie plate shields to keep crust rim from burning. Bake for about 25-30 minutes more. A knife inserted in the center should come out clean. Note to self: purchase another 9″ pie crust shield– they are so much easier to use than foil.
Let quiche rest about 15 minutes before serving. You can make the day before and reheat in the oven.
How big IS that egg, or a few words about egg sizes.
In the olden days, farmers would gather eggs from their hen houses and use this Jiffy Way Egg Scale to measure the egg’s weight and grade, from small to extra large, for marketing purposes.
My friend, Patty, gave me this scale with the marketing logo “DeKalb Chix” printed on it. I treasure it!
Our chicken eggs range in size from medium to extra large, so often times I have to weight them to get the right amount of eggs for a recipe.
Medium to extra-large.
A little more or less volume won’t matter with a quiche, but it would definitely matter with a cake or pastry recipe where the ratio of dry to liquid ingredients needs to be accurate. This recipe called for 20 ounces. I use my modern digital scale for weighing!
The more you know…
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Follow my photos of vegetables growing, backyard chickens hanging out, and dinner preparations on Instagram at JudysChickens.
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© 2014-2017 Judy Wright. All rights reserved. Photos and text may only be used with written consent.
My high-spirited Great Aunt Bridget was the original #nofilter. Always, words were coming out of her mouth that caused us to look at one another as if to say, Did she really just say that? She had a memorable look, too: her hair was always done up, her dresses were colorful, and she rocked the cat-eye glasses look. She was comfortable in her own skin. AND, she made a great pot of chicken soup. Between the things she said, the clothes she wore, the bouffant hairdos, and the food she cooked, Aunt Bridget was memorable. And, loved. What more could we each want?
She and her husband, Uncle Jerome, both immigrants from Sicily, owned successful side by side businesses on Eastern Avenue in Baltimore — Bridget’s Beauty Shoppe and Jerome’s Barber Shop. They created an interior doorway between their adjoining buildings so they and their customers could visit one another all day. It was a happening place. As a little girl, I loved to sit under the hairdryer hood and basque in the attention of my aunt as she paraded her loyal customers by my chair so they could meet her grandniece.
In this photo from 1963, Aunt Bridget is standing at the forefront of her salon wearing a white uniform, and Uncle Jerome is in the back in his barber’s shirt. Aunt Bridget employed a dozen full-time “operators.” They were her girls, and they were busy. This was when women went to the beauty parlor weekly to get their hair washed and set. Upstairs from the shop, Aunt Bridget had a kitchen where she and her niece, Theresa, fed everyone — either chicken soup or spaghetti and meatballs.
One year, in the mid-1970s, I visited my grandparents in Florida during Easter break; so did my Aunt Bridget. In the whirlwind that signaled her arrival from the airport, my aunt walked into the kitchen, opened her purse, and pulled out an “old hen,” complete with its collagen-laden feet. She announced she was going to make a pot of soup. Her nephew had brought her by the Fell’s Point Farmers Market in Baltimore to get the hen on the way to dropping her off at the airport. I regret now that I spent more time rolling my 19-year-old eyes than looking for a pen and paper to write down her soup recipe; it was the best. I have spent years trying to recreate it.
What was so memorable about Aunt Bridget’s soup was the broth’s full-bodied flavor and the light, bite-sized meatballs that floated on the surface.
In my early attempts at recreating her broth, I was left with either perfectly cooked chicken in a thin stock that had to be boosted with a bouillon cube or a great tasting stock with tasteless, limp meat. Eventually, I figured out a way to have both rich stock and tasty meat. I simmered the soup for sixty minutes, removed the chicken thighs, pulled the meat off the bones, set the meat aside, and returned the bones to the stockpot to simmer for a few more hours.
About the Ingredients
My mother taught me to use chicken thighs when making soup. As the mother of seven children, she worried about us choking on small bones, so using whole chicken breasts with ribs attached was out. That was fine with me because I love the taste of thigh meat.
Bones, cartilage, and connective tissue contain a protein called collagen. As the bones simmer in water, the collagen breaks down, and once chilled, congeals into gelatin. This gelatin is your goal in broth-making. If the broth is not cooked long enough or is too dilute, it will not gel up like this.
The aromatic vegetables used to flavor a stock are known as mirepoix (pronounced “MEER-pwah”). The standard French mirepoix consists of 50% onions, 25% carrots, and 25% celery. Other aromatics I use are garlic and parsley.
Now to get started! First, we’ll make the broth, then the meatballs, and then add the greens.
To Make the Broth
Chicken stock ingredients:
8 pounds chicken thighs, with skin and bones
5 quarts cold water
1 large unpeeled onion (1 pound), quartered
⅓ head celery, with leaves (½ pound)
4 unpeeled carrots (½ pound)
6 cloves unpeeled garlic (½ ounce)
10 whole stems Italian flat-leafed parsley
3 fragrant bay leaves
1 teaspoon black pepper, or about 20 twists of the pepper grinder
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
Yield: 4 quarts of chicken stock
Instructions:
Rinse and drain chicken. Put in a large stockpot.
Cover with cold water. If you start with hot water, the stock could become cloudy. Bring ingredients to a simmer. Remove foam as it forms.
Prep the mirepoix: wash unpeeled vegetables and cut into large chunks. Add to stockpot. Add seasonings: bay leaves, garlic, parsley, and pepper. I do not add salt until I decide how I’m going to use the broth.
Add the vinegar. Acids such as vinegar or lemon juice help break down cartilage and pull nutritious minerals like calcium out of the bones.
Bring stock to a gentle simmer and cook for 60 minutes. A hard boil will make the stock cloudy.
Using a slotted spoon, remove the thighs. Once cool enough to touch, pick off the meat and refrigerate until later.
Return bones, cartilage, and skin back to the stockpot. Simmer for a minimum of 5 hours. Strain through a colander positioned over a large container.
To get a couple more cups of flavorful stock, put the solids from inside the colander back into the stockpot. Add about 3 cups of hot water and stir. Run the solids and stock through the colander again, collect the stock, and add to the saved container of stock. Discard solids.
Strain the stock through a fine sieve to clarify it further.
Refrigerate stock until fat rises to the top and hardens. Use a spoon to scrape it off.
To Make the Meatballs
Ingredients:
Yield: 70 small meatballs
1 pound of ground meat. (I use a package of combined beef, pork, and veal when I can find it.)
2 eggs, slightly beaten
¼ cup fresh parsley, chopped
½ cup grated Reggiano Parmesan cheese
¾ cup unseasoned bread crumbs
zest from 1 lemon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon sea salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly cracked pepper
2 tablespoons water
Mise en Place for Meatballs:
Grate the Parmesan cheese.
To learn how to make your own bread crumbs, go here, or buy plain, fine bread crumbs.
Zest a lemon.
Place all ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix gently until just blended– less than 30 seconds.
Use a melon scoop to make bite-sized meatballs. Place on a 13″ x 18″ rimmed sheet pan. The meat mixture weighed 1½ pounds. From that, I made 70 meatballs. Set aside.
Prep the Greens
I used spinach because I have so much of it in my garden. Otherwise, escarole or endive would be my first choice. Wash the greens. If leaves are large, chop them.
.
Putting It All Together
Ingredients:
4 quarts chicken stock, homemade or boxed
1 pound fresh spinach
About 70 uncooked bite-sized meatballs
1 pound cooked small pasta, such as ditalini, cooked separately
Bring the pot of chicken broth to a boil in a soup pot. Add the meatballs. Simmer for about 15 minutes.
Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the greens.
Serve immediately while greens are still brightly colored. 
Sprinkle with freshly grated Reggiano Parmesan. If desired, serve over pasta cooked separately. Do not cook the pasta in the broth — it will soak up most of the liquid.
Postscript
Only the most memorable great-aunts get chickens named after them! Our two Rhode Island Reds were named Bridget and Josephine (my grandfather’s sisters who had reddish-brown hair). The two blonde Buff Orpingtons were named after my husband’s blonde grandmothers, Mildred and Alice. The two black and white Plymouth Barred Rocks were named after my silver and black-haired grandmothers, Marion and Concetta.
Aunt Josephine and Aunt Bridget flank their older brother, my grandfather, at my wedding. They were the last of the thirteen Giordano siblings.
Other Soups
Chicken Stock from Rotisserie Chicken Bones
Mrs. Lombard’s Portuguese Kale Soup
Pasta e Fagioli, aka Pasta and Bean Soup
Award-Winning Buffalo Chicken Chili
Kelly’s Duck Stew
Other Family Favorites
Baked Ziti with Roasted Eggplant, Mozzarella, and Marinara Sauce
Grandma’s Italian Fried Cauliflower
Rapini and Fettuccini
Spiralized Zucchini with Fresh Marinara Sauce
Rachelle’s Italian Sausage, Onions, and Peppers
Italian Sesame Seed Cookies
Italian Ricotta and Lemon Cookies
LET’S STAY CONNECTED!
Follow my photos of vegetables growing, backyard chickens hanging out, and dinner preparations on Instagram @JudysChickens.
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© 2014-2020 Judy Wright. All rights reserved. Photos and text may only be used with written consent.
Okay, it’s a fruitcake!
I’ve been trying to figure out another name for this outrageously delicious bread that does not conjure up cross-sections of red and green candied cherries. Instead, these are the beautiful fruits and nuts that go into this bread.
Whenever I serve this bread, almost everyone asks for the recipe. I have been making some variation of it since I first adapted it from The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, or “Silver Palate 2” as we called it back in the Eighties.
Every December, around Christmas time, I pull out all the half-used packages of dried fruit and unsalted nuts, weigh out 52 ounces of fruit and 28 ounces of nuts, and make this bread. The only dried fruit that is a must-have in the bunch is the prunes. You could say this is how I clean out my pantry every year.
Yield: Makes 3 loaves or 8 mini loaves
Ingredients:
52 ounces dried fruit: prunes, dates, cherries, raisins, and/or apricots
28 ounces nuts: pecans, almonds, and walnuts
½ cup all-purpose flour
6 eggs, room temperature, separated
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup brown sugar
grated zest of one orange
6 tablespoons butter, melted
5 tablespoons whipping cream
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
½ teaspoon almond extract
1½ cups whole wheat flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
Instructions:
Prepare oven and pans:
Preheat oven to 325º.
Spray three 9x5x3 loaf pans lightly with cooking spray. Line each pan with aluminum foil. Butter the foil liner. We do this tedious process because the bread needs to cook for a long time at a low temperature. The foil keeps the loaves from drying out and sticking to the pans. As a test, I made two regular loaves and three mini loaves. I didn’t use foil on the mini loaves, and the bread stuck to the pans. I’m a believer. The reason you spray the pan before lining it with foil is for easy release of the foil-lined loaves after they have baked. These steps are all necessary. Believe me, I’m not one for make-work.
Measure fruit and nuts:
I keep large bags of dried fruits and nuts in the pantry. When it comes time to make this recipe, I pour a good mix of them into a bowl placed on a digital scale and keep adding more until the scale reads 3 pounds, 4 ounces. Then I pour in the nuts until the scale reads a total of 5 pounds.
Technique Time: Zeroing out a scale
A digital scale is a good tool to have in the kitchen. I recommend this one by OXO because it can weigh items up to 11 pounds. You’ll need to weigh the mixing bowl first and “zero out” that weight before adding the fruits and nuts. To do this, place the large empty bowl on the scale. This bowl weighs 5 pounds and 2.5 ounces. Push the “zero” button. The scale is now ready to show the weight of just the ingredients in the bowl.
Here is a list of the fruits and nuts I typically use :
16 oz prunes + 5 oz cherries + 6 oz apricots (cut each in half) +
8 oz raisins + 17 oz pitted dates (cut each in half) = total of 52 oz.
As for the nuts, I typically use 16 oz pecans + 8 oz walnuts + 4 oz slivered almonds = a total of 28 oz.
Next, add ½ cup of all-purpose flour and mix with your hands to break up the fruits that are stuck together. Make sure every morsel of food is dusted with the flour. This helps keep them from sinking to the bottom of the pan while baking.
Prepare the batter
Separate the eggs into whites and yolks.
Beat egg whites on high speed in a clean, dry, mixing bowl until the whites puff up and form peaks. Don’t overbeat the egg whites. Use a rubber spatula to gently move the beaten whites to another bowl. Set aside.
Next, add the eggs and sugars to the mixing bowl. There is no need to wash the bowl first. Cream ingredients together for 2 minutes on medium-high speed.
Add the grated zest of one orange. To learn more about zesting citrus, go here.
Add melted butter, heavy cream, vanilla, and almond extract to the batter and mix for one minute on medium speed.
In a separate small bowl, use a whisk to mix the whole wheat flour and baking powder.
Add flour mixture to batter and stir gently for 30 seconds until ingredients are well-blended. Do not over mix.
Now you have a bowl of batter and a bowl of stiff egg whites.
Fold egg whites gently into the batter and blend until just mixed. This process of “folding in” the fluffed up egg whites makes your batter lighter.
Stir batter into the bowl with the fruits and nuts.
Pour batter evenly into three loaf pans. Use your fingers to create a mound down the midline of each loaf pan.
Bake loaves covered with a sheet of foil for the first 40 minutes.
After 40 minutes, remove foil and bake for another 40 minutes. Loaves will be medium brown in color when done. Oven temperatures vary, so check the color at 30 minutes. You can’t rely on the knife test to check for doneness because it continues to come out with crumbs on it, even when the loaves are done.
This bread freezes well. I found one in my freezer that was one and a half years old. When I thawed it, I was prepared to throw it out, but instead, it was perfectly delicious.
For other holiday ideas, check out the Holiday menu on the taskbar.
Other Quick Breads:
Marion’s Crazy Good Pumpkin Bread with Chocolate Chips
Ellen’s Most Moist Zucchini Bread
Cranberry Muffins with Orange Zest and Pecans
The Biscuit King
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© 2014-2020 Judy Wright. All rights reserved. Photos, videos, and text may not be reproduced without the written consent of Judy Wright.
@judyschickens 