Love Quiche

The house smelled amazing when I got home yesterday.

"It's Love Quiche!" Mary and her friend declared as they pulled the quiche from the oven. Eggs, four kinds of cheese, milk, and onions. The most simple quiche in the world.

A Frost Warning warning echoed in my head, so as the girls sliced and served the quiche, I pulled the tomato plants from the garden and hung them upside down in the basement. I cut herbs and tied them in bunches to dry while they hang in the stairwell and felt a little like Laura Ingalls (I love that Garth Williams illustration of Laura and Mary playing in the attic of the cabin during the winter.).

(It was not a good summer for tomatoes in Nebraska. I planted late due to the heavy rain in the early spring. And it was miserably hot for weeks on end which interferred with the tomatoes. (They need water but not too much water and they need sun, but not too much sun. They're really not difficult to grow. Things were extreme this year.) So the result is that I have plants heavy with healthy GREEN tomatoes. And there are only so many green tomato things that I want to cook (I do like a green tomato pizza). But if you pull the plants by their roots and hang them upside down in a dry, dark place, they ripen. Really!)

I sliced some ripe heirloom tomatoes to serve along side the Vegetarian "Love Quiche," as the girls called it. They outlined their cooking process - the eggs came from the friend's chickens, the crust was my Grams' recipe, written on a notecard from my recipe box, and the quiche recipe came from Julia Child (who of course liked to cook chickens, as well as eat chicken eggs).

It was amazing and we ate it all.