should we?

i rarely keep pie dough for more than one month in the freezer, especially not when it was specifically made for freezing, but rather, left over from making a pie. but here we go, two-months-old pie dough from the cindy mushet apple pie. and the butter hasn't gone rancid; the only problem was that it was barely enough for the small pie plate i had.

i made the quiche lorraine from julia child's book.
a lot of work went into preparing the bacon for the quiche. first it was the blanching, though that was optional. it's supposed to take away the smoky, salty taste of the bacon. then i had to dry the bacon and brown it over fire. then it finally went into the half-baked shell.
the custard is easy enough - just eggs, milk, cream, a pinch of salt and a pinch of nutmeg. i hate nutmeg actually, but in this custard the presence is masked somehow, and it makes it smell nice altogether. so in the custard went, over the bacon.
the pale yellow blobs you see here are, indeed, butter. i used good lurpak butter. i love it because it can hold its shape well for quite long even though it's softened. so i was actually pinching off blobs to drop over the quiche, without them sticking to my fingers and turning into a mess.
the setting of the custard was quite magical. it happened quite late during the baking, and rather quickly too. i mean, when you have nothing to do, you end up sitting by the oven watching the quiche bake. and for a long while the custard still appears shiny and watery. then after a while you realise that a skin has formed, and that the custard jiggles instead of sloshes.
the blobs of butter didn't melt and get assimilated into the custard. instead, they just melted and sat in pools on the surface, creating craters at the end of the bake. (which looked quite pretty.)
the quiche smelled like carbonara, and it almost was, just minus the pasta. and the custard sliced very neatly. there was not enough bacon though; in one mouthful, i got a lot of tender, jiggly custard, but not enough smoky, salty bacon. but i must say that the milk and cream made the custard taste very comforting.