Liz Denys

I love to make and eat quiche. In fact, there was hardly a week last year that would pass where there wasn't a quiche in my refrigerator because I just love quiche that much. Why? Well, it's great any time of day, it reheats well, it can feed a crowd, and it doesn't have to be complicated or actively time consuming to make.

But the best part of quiche is that you only need to know one basic method to make virtually any everyday quiche. Of course, you can always level up and use more complex methods to make 3-inch tall spinach quiches in springform pans, but you have to care more about the specific ingredients you use because their weights become a factor you must incorporate into the recipe. Everyday quiches follow a simple, easy to remember method:

Roll out a pie crust (homemade is best, see below) and fit it into a pie pan. I like to use glass pie pans because it's easiest to see how much the crust has baked during blind baking, as the top will be covered with foil. Blind bake the pie crust by covering it with aluminum foil then filling the foil with pie weights for about 15 minutes at 450 degrees. If you don't have pie weights, dry rice or beans can be used instead, but you won't get as much mileage out of them if you make pies a lot. (You also probably won't be able to eat them later.) Blind baking is important in many pies because crust often needs to bake at higher temperatures than the rest of the pie to achieve the desired flaky texture.

If you're using a harder cheese, like cheddar or Gruyère, top the crust with cheese (here, I used sharp cheddar) after blind baking the crust and bake for another 5 minutes at 375 degrees. This keeps heavier cheeses separate from the egg and cream or milk quiche base, resulting in a lighter, fluffier quiche.

A quiche's ingredients can really be whatever you want. Commonly used ingredients include bacon, bell peppers, onions, asparagus, spinach, and mushrooms, but you should really only use this list as inspiration. My favorite quiche combination, used here, is crispy bacon, lightly caramelized onions, green apples (they're fantastic in quiche), and sharp cheddar.

Eggs obviously play an important role in quiche, and the addition of cream or milk makes them fluffy. I find that the easiest way to get the proportion of egg to liquid right in the quiche base is to crack your eggs into a measuring cup and fill with cream or milk (you can use either or any mixture of the two) until the measuring cup contains 1/2 cups times the number of eggs worth of substance. I used three eggs, so I filled the measuring cup to 1 1/2 cups.

Next, transfer the egg mixture to a mixing bowl, add a pinch of nutmeg and some salt and freshly ground pepper, and beat together until very well blended. Layer the ingredients in the pie crust, then pour the egg mixture over the ingredients.

Bake the quiche for 45 minutes at 375 degrees. I like to take the quiche out of the oven 10 minutes early and top with more cheese if I'm using a hard cheese to add another texture to the smooth, light pie.

In my opinion, the best pie crusts are made from scratch. Homemade pie crusts tend to be butterier than what you can find at a store, and they freeze just as nicely for long-term storage. I suggest making a few at a time if you plan to bake more than one pie over the course of the next few months. The following recipe is a great pie crust to have on hand because it's only lightly sweetened with sugar, so it works well in both savory and sweet pies.

Lightly sweet pâte brisée

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour - traditionally, this is 3/4 cups all-purpose flour + 1/4 cup cake flour, but honestly, I usually just use 1 cup bread flour because it's what's already out.
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup ice water

Preparation:

1. Combine 1/2 cup flour, salt, and sugar in a food processor and pulse a few times until mixed together.
2. Add the thin slices of butter to the mixture and pulse until even crumbs form.
3. Add the remaining 1/2 cup flour and pulse to combine.
4. Add the ice water and pulse until the dough is fully incorporated. Freeze until ready to use, and defrost just enough so that the dough can be rolled out between two sheets of cling wrap or wax paper.

Makes one 9-inch pie crust.

Creamsicles were one of my favorite desserts as a child. Whenever my family went to the pool, I would absolutely dread the 15 minutes every hour that I couldn't stay in the pool known as adult swim - until I headed over to the pool's snack shop and grabbed a creamsicle.

Unfortunately, as I grew older, I became less fond of ice creams (really, I don't know why, but frozen cream just doesn't do it for me anymore), but I still longed for the marriage of flavors between crisp oranges and sweet cream. So now I make panna cotta.

Panna cotta, or "cooked cream," is actually one of the simplest desserts to make (well, now that you can use gelatin instead of fish bones). It takes trivially more effort than jello (you have to measure out ingredients instead of just pouring out of a box) and the end result has a dramatically more elegant silky texture. Below is my recipe to satisfy my desires for a warmer creamsicle, clementine panna cotta, but if you replace the zest and vanilla extract with half a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste, you end up with a traditional vanilla panna cotta. But you can experiment with the flavors using the rest of the recipe as a base.

Clementine panna cotta

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon powdered gelatin (packets of gelatin usually contain 1 tablespoon)
• 9 ounces milk
• 24 ounces heavy cream
• 7.5 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon clementine (or orange) zest
• 1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 6 clementine (or orange) slices for topping
• Honey for topping

Preparation:

1. Combine the gelatin and 4 ounces of the milk in a small bowl. Leave to absorb for about 10 minutes.
2. Combine the remaining milk, cream, sugar, and clementine zest in a heavy-based saucepan and bring to a boil.
3. Remove from the heat, and add to the gelatin mixture. Also add the vanilla extract. Whisk until completely dissolved.
4. Cool to room temperature. Strain, if desired (this will prevent zest from accumulating at the bottom of the bowl but is purely a matter of taste and presentation preferences), and pour into six 1-cup bowls or glasses. Cover and refrigerate for 5 hours. Turn out of bowls if desired for serving.

Makes 6 individual panna cottas.

Earlier this week, I made bacon cheddar scallion biscuits because I had been craving an especially savory breakfast bread option for those mornings that you wake up a little bit later than you'd like. Nothing too fancy, just fifteen traditional country biscuits except that I replaced some of the butter with bacon fat and added bacon, scallions, and a lot of extra sharp cheddar cheese.

But then late Friday night rolled around: I had already eaten dinner, but wanted just a tiny bit more food. Naturally, I was craving a burger, but knew that I couldn't handle a full portion. I had almost resigned myself to making myself a miniature burger with all the fixings but without a bun, but glanced over towards the toaster oven and noticed eight perfectly sized bacony, cheddary, buttery biscuits - practically waiting to become burger buns.

Putting caramelized onions, bacon, and cheddar on the burger along with the already flavor-packed biscuit felt like overkill, so instead, I left the bacon to the biscuit and put very finely diced onions along with slightly more grated extra sharp cheddar cheese in the burger patty itself. Well, that's a bit of a lie, a tablespoon or so more of grated cheddar ended up on top of the burger patty because cheese is kind of just that good. When the burgers seemed about done, I very, very lightly toasted (they had a lot of cheese in them) the bacon cheddar scallion biscuits.

All in all, these sliders were quite rich, but hardly overbearingly so. And quite delicious. I woke up the next day wanting them again (or maybe I just really have immense, insatiable burger cravings), so I made them for brunch the next day, too.

It's beginning to feel a lot like fall: the weather is finally cooling down, leaves are browning, and pumpkin spice lattes are abundant.

Being a coffee fan, I caved about a year ago and bought pumpkin spice latte syrup. It made for a delicious replica of the coffee shop classic, but wouldn't it just be so much better with pumpkin pulp and spices instead of a sugary syrup?

After a little over twenty minutes in front of a stove and a couple of minutes with a hand mixer, cream, vanilla, and confectioners' sugar, we got to enjoy these:

The pumpkin puree made them thicker than your average pumpkin spice latte, so they didn't froth as well as the average latte. However, they were earthier, while still sweet, and I'd say more delicious than any pumpkin spice latte I've ever gotten in a coffee shop and certainly more delicious than any I've made at home with a syrup before.

I made twice the recipe below so that I could put the glass bottle full of extra latte in the fridge. They were also delicious cold the next day.

Pumpkin spice latte

Ingredients:

• 2 cups milk (preferably whole or 2%)
• 4 tablespoons pureed pumpkin
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon a combination of ground ginger, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon (if you don't know how much to use of each, use equal parts)
• 3 shots espresso

Preparation:

1. Combine milk, pumpkin, and brown sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until steaming.
2. Remove from heat. Add in vanilla and the various spices. Blend until foamy. (An immersion blender is easiest, but you can transfer to a regular, counter-top blender as well.) If you don't mind the pumpkin being a bit thicker, you can also simply whisk the mixture together until well combined.
3. Pour mixture over espresso and serve.

Yields two servings.

Every time I come across this photograph on my computer, I am impressed by how simultaneously dull and sharp the sky was that day in San Francisco. When editing this photograph I took now about three and a half years ago, I only flattened the sky slightly and didn't touch up the trees or recolor the rest of the frame at all.

It remains my favorite photograph that I have taken to date.