Q is for quail

 Q is for quail, a lovely small game bird that is farmed nowadays.  They are very tasty to eat, although there isn’t much meat on them.  Also quails eggs are very delicious in salads.  They are quite fiddly to peel being so small, but well worth the effort.

A dish that often is not made at home but is simple and tasty, if a little time consuming, is the quiche.  These come in various flavours, the most well known being quiche lorraine, named after a place, not a person.  Quiche lorraine started life as a simple open pie with a bread based crust and containing smoked bacon or lardons, however it has evolved as more ingredients have been added to the popular recipe over time.  Now it is best known for containing bacon, onion and cheese in the egg custard mix that lines the shortcrust pie case.  Some people also add tomato.  Originally this dish was cooked in a cast iron pan and the edges were not crimped.  More often now the dish is cooked in a flan dish and comes out with lovely crimped edges, making the pastry nice and crisp.

To make your own quiche follow the steps:

1. You need to prepare a pastry base first.  This can be made using 175g of plain flour and 75g of butter. 
2. Rub the two ingredients together forming crumbs and then add enough cold water to squeeze the mix into a dough. 
3. Don’t add too much water or the mix becomes a sticky mess!
4. You can add a little more flour if you feel you’ve overdone the water but don’t go too mad with the flour as you need to have the ratio of flour to butter so the crust crisps. 
5. If you don’t feel confident making pastry you can always buy the ready made version.
6.   Some people like to leave the dough in the fridge overnight before rolling out. 
7. This is quite important if you are a warm handed person, as cold hands make the best pastry because the butter does not melt so much.
8.   Whatever you do make sure you put the rolled pastry case in the fridge in its dish for a few hours before completing the recipe. 
9. It will make the pastry less soggy after cooking. 
10. Now you need to blind bake the case for about 20 minutes in a medium heat oven. 
11. Gas number 5 should do nicely.  (190c/375f). 
12. Line the pastry case with greaseproof paper or baking parchment and weight it down with something, I use balls of the leftover pastry mix, some use baking beans, whatever you use it must not burn when in the oven. 
13. After 20 minutes remove the parchment and return the pastry case to the oven for 5 more minutes.  Leave it out of the oven while you prepare the filling.
14.   To do this fry your bacon so it’s cooked through, and also the other ingredients you are using, be they onion, tomato or anything else that needs cooking. 
15. Put a layer of cheese in the cooked pastry case and add your cooked ingredients on top.
16. Now beat 5 eggs together with 100ml of milk and 200ml of double cream.
17.   If you like seasoning add salt and pepper before pouring this mixture over the top of the cooked ingredients and cook in the oven for 30-40 minutes, or until your mixture is set, at gas mark 3/160c/325f. 
18. If you like herbs you can sprinkle a couple of sprigs of thyme leaves over the top before cooking.  It adds a unique flavour to the dish. For a vegetarian option leave out the bacon and instead use tomatoes, onions and cheese.

Words beginning with Q that are not automatically thought of when considering food and cooking include:

• quinine, a drug used to treat malaria, but is also added in small doses to tonic water in both India and the USA for flavour,

• Queensborough, another name for the ugli fruit, discovered by a prominent orchid artist, Henry Queensborough Levy, in Jamaica in the 1920′s.