New Year's Day Cooking Marathon

After a successful Champagne Chicken recipe last night (2012's was a bust!), it put me in the mood to try a few more recipes I've been looking at and to do some bakeware testing.  The morning started with Quiche Lorraine.  The nearby grocery store has a really good one for about $10, and it's always a surprise, because it doesn't label what kind of extra ingredients are going to be in it.  Sometimes it's just plain, sometimes it had spinach and if you're lucky sometimes it has BACON in it!  :)

I found a recipe on Pinterest that looked pretty tasty.  I thought we could maybe have it for breakfast today (I started it about 7am), but I had to cook the onions for about 1 hour and then it says it has to sit in the fridge for a day.  So it looks like we'll be eating it tomorrow.  We did have enough batter to make a crustless quiche in one of my mini pie pans and after eating all of that, we can attest it was very good!  A word of caution: Make sure the pie pan is as level as you can get it when it's in the oven.  We noticed ours was off and there was some batter leaking, but we figured it would stop once it got to a certain level.  NOPE! I looked back about 10 minutes later and about half the batter was on the cookie sheet!  I carefully scooped back into the pie crust and adjusted it so it was more level.

At about 10am, I started making some banana bread. (no picture). Arya goes through bananas like nobody's business, but every once in a while, one gets to the overripe stage and I stash it in the freezer.  I had three frozen bananas and 3 ripe/overripe fresh bananas.  I got a Le Crueset loaf pan for Christmas and we still have one supposedly nonstick pan, so we'll see which one fares better.  As I'm writing this and as the bread is in the oven, I just realized I never dusted the pans after putting the spray on it….hmm, getting the bread out might just be a little interesting now.  Note: we used plain greek yogurt instead of sour cream.  Update of bakeware test: both did not stick!  I should have left the Le Crueset pan in there longer as it was a little doughy.  The recipe called for 1 hour, I did closer to 1.5 hours and I'd say next time to have the Le Crueset in there at least 1.75 hours.

Next on my list is red pepper hummus.  I made a really good one a month or so ago and I have to see if I can find my notes, because it was really good and I made modification, I think. (Found them, they are in the comments of my Pin)  I've been eating a store bought one that is blended with greek yogurt, so I may try that.  My only issue with making hummus is I only have a mini food processor. Maybe a bigger food processor is in my future….(30th Birthday is coming up).. Or perhaps I could just use the blender this time and see if that works. Update: our old blender didn't make it too easy to make hummus.