A savory tart for kids to eat green vegetables, for spinash lovers or simply for quiche lovers like me, the perfect French homecooking dish in my opinion.
Why I decided to add spinach in quiche
To tell you the truth, I first cooked this recipe about 15 years ago when my daughters were very very young to make them eat green vegetables. Quiche Lorraine and different savory tarts are very popular in France. Quiche is a staple of French home cooking, the kind of dish we prepare without thinking of what we’re doing, with pie pastry, eggs, cream and/or milk, and any ingredient we have on hand: cheese, ham, bacon, fish, and any vegetable.
So to come back to my story my daughters actually loved this quiche and it became a must-cook every now and then. I even took the habit when we have a long drive to go on holidays to bring a quiche aux épinards. You never know what will happen, this way I always had something healthy in the car to feed the kids if needed. They love this spinach quiche so much that they protest when I cook a quiche Lorraine. In their opinion, a normal quiche is with spinach! How cute…
Information on the recipe
For this recipe, I use defrosted spinaches (ground or not), a large bowl but you can of course buy fresh spinach (about 500 to 750 gr) and cook them for 5 minutes in a pan, drain the vegetation water and use it as it is in the quiche.
As for the batter, it’s the classic quiche egg, cream, and/or milk mix. The cream quantities are of crème fraîche heavy cream and milk but you may replace it with 350 ml half and half.
For spinach and quiche lovers
Like many French I absolutely love quiche and bake some all the time, sometimes almost every week, adding inside to the batter all kinds of filling. Therefore you can of course find on the blog the ultimate quiche lorraine (with the story behind the dish) you’ll notice that there is no cheese in the traditional recipe, although it’s ok to add some! I also have other quiche recipes, with caramelized onion and bacon, with zucchini and sweet corn, and with smoked haddock and leek.
And if you like to serve spinach as a side, here is how I serve spinach with lots of roasted garlic. Don’t worry it’s not strong at all and indeed very flavorful.
Spinach and bacon quiche
Ingredients
- 1 shortcrust pastry
- spinach equivalent to 1 full breakfast bowl about 320 gr frozen and 220 gr after defrosting and drained
- 250 gr bacon use smoked bacon
- 5 eggs
- 25 cl crème fraîche heavy cream
- 10 cl milk
- 2 handful cheese grated cheese Emmental, Comté…
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 185 °C.
- Start by defrosting spinach in the microwave and then drain well to remove possible water.
- Prepare the quiche batter.
- Break the eggs and beat them as for an omelet.
- Add cream and milk and whisk.
- Then add bacon, spinach and grated cheese, combine.
- Dress and bake
- Roll out the shortcrust pastry in a tart mold (ideally made of metal, the crust will cook better).
- Make small peaks with a fork then pour in the preparation.
- Optionally sprinkle more cheese on top.
- Cook for about 40 minutes at 185 °C.
C’est très bien, merci beaucoup! Made this for the family this evening. And, like you, I wanted to get my young one to enjoy green vegetables!
Bonjour Robbie, Thank you very much for your feed back. I’m glad your young loved vegetables this way :-)