Its officially the festive party season, my favourite time of the year. It is always handy to have some ‘party food’ to hand in case people pop by which is why I tend to spend the first weekend of December in my kitchen whipping up as many party bites as I can think of. I often make mini ones as they’re so easy to make, so handy to pass around and often people just want a few bites of food whilst quaffing their champagne. I tend to stick to the classics…homemade sausage rolls and mini quiches. They’re easy to make, they taste delicious and they freeze perfectly. You can make loads of them, freeze them in batches and bring them out to defrost when you know people will be coming by. They don’t take too long to defrost because they’re so small.
I usually make mini Quiche Lorraine’s but this year I decided to make some wild mushroom ones too. I kept to the same recipe as the Quiche Lorraine’s, I just replaced the smoked bacon with a mix of chestnut and porcini mushrooms. I also used Jus-Rol ready-rolled shortcrust pastry to make it easier. Who needs to make things harder at Christmas?? Make life easy on yourself…you deserve it.
These ingredients make approx 30 mini quiches. Obviously, if you don’t need that many, just half the ingredients.
INGREDIENTS
2 ready-rolled shortcrust pastry sheets
1 large onion, finely chopped
250g chestnut mushrooms, finely chopped
50g dried porcini, rehydrated in boiling water
1 tsp dried thyme
4 eggs
100ml double cream
200ml milk
300g cheddar cheese, grated
I used this tin I got from Lakeland and I managed to get about 15-20 pastry ‘circles’ out of one Jus-Rol ready-rolled sheet. (Obviously after cutting out all I could get from the rolled pastry, I rolled up the leftovers, re-rolled it and cut more out.)
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F, then gently fry the onion in a little oil until they start to become golden round the edges. Remove from the pan then fry up the diced chestnut mushrooms.
Soak the dried porcini mushrooms in boiling water then drain, keeping the liquid.
Chop the porcini and add to the chestnut mushrooms already in the pan. Add the thyme, season and fry for 5/10 minutes, adding some of the porcini mushroom liquid to cook it in. This just adds some extra flavour to it.
Add the onions, stir through and set aside to cool.
Roll out your pastry and cut rounds with a cookie cutter.
Line a 12 hole tin with the pastry rounds.
Then fill each one with the mushroom mixture.
In a jug whisk together the eggs, cream and milk and pour equally into the uncooked quiches, being careful not to overfill.
Top with the grated cheese.
Then pop into the oven for 15-20 minutes until golden and bubbling.
2 Comments
do you grease your tin before filling it with pastry? I always have to worst time with pastry sticking in little tins. I’m convinced it’s a personal curse.
I didn’t need to but my tin is relatively new. I just put the pastry straight in. And when it came out the oven the quiches slid straight out. However, I do have an older tin that I sometimes need to butter. I just melt a little butter and brush it inside the moulds before adding the pastry rounds.