Cooking with Plink/Plinkography: Quicheything!

HULLO and welcome to a Plinkography/Cooking With Plink combo special! Yaaay!

The human is on night shifts this week, so I took over the kitchen in a rare fit of doing something nice for her to make a quichey-flan thing to take to work for lunch. See? It's not all explosions, trashing the study and leaving giant squid slime on the stairs.

This recipe makes a deliciously original* bacon, egg and vegetable flan, using filo pastry to avoid all those naughty, naughty calories.

So make sure you're ready to cook, lock the rampaging robots in the lab and gather your ingredients!

That's: 3 large eggs, 25g cornflour, a few cherry tomatoes, a handful of spinach, a medium leek, half a big red onion, 5 rashers of smoked bacon, 6 filo pastry sheets, a handful of tenderstem broccoli, 25g of mature cheddar. Not pictured: 300ml semi-skinned milk. 

First, prepare your vegetables. Get a human to set the oven to 200 degrees if it's a normal oven, 180 if there's a fan in there somewhere.

The cherry tomatoes are just chopped into quarters. 

Then trim the fat off of the bacon. This is so your lardy human doesn't get lardier. Cut the bacon into 1cm strips.

Aah, I love you, bacon. 

Chuck the broccoli into some boiling water for 2-3 minutes to tenderise.

Hubble bubble toil and trouble.

Then shove it under a cold tap to think about what it's done. Chuck in a bowl.

GREEN

Gently fry the onion, leek and bacon in 1 tsp of olive oil until soft. Put in the bowl with the broccoli and toss together.

A GLORIOUS MELANGE

Now prepare the filo. Extract the crumbling, disintegrating sheets from the packet and attempt to place one sheet on top of another at right-angles into the oiled flan dish, oiling the pastry layers lightly inbetween. Fold the edges down into the dish; this helps to make the delicious crusty crust bit.

Misbehaving filo

Break 3 eggs into a jug, then measure 300ml of milk into the measuring cup that came with the breadmaker, because you've now got eggs in your only measuring jug.

In a non-stick pan, mix a little of the milk with the cornflour to make a smooth paste. Add all but 100ml of the rest of the milk and stir over a low heat until it suddenly turns into gloop! Take off the heat, add the cold milk to the gloop to thin and cool it, then stir in the eggs.

Getting mah dairy on.

Add a handful of spinach to the veggies and bacon, then arrange half of the mixture in the dish. Pour over the eggymilkgloop before topping with the rest of the vegetables and the cherry tomatoes, making sure it looks reasonably pretty.

Delicious-looking before it's cooked!

Grate over the cheese and bake for 20-30 minutes, depending on the ferocity of your oven. The pastry should be brown on the edges and the eggymix set in the middle.

Pull out and pose with your marvellous creation. This will create 6 to 8 human sized portions, 60-80 Makie-sized ones. Hoorah!

Nom!

*Stolen from the Hairy Biker's "Love food and lose weight" diet book and adapted to suit tastes.