The Quiche that Kicked my Butt, or Je Suis Une Quiche

Last month, to celebrate the change of season and all the nice produce that comes with it, I wanted to cook something supremely autumnal: le cèpe. A cèpe is a mushroom that reaches giant proportions in forests in France. As the French seem to love this mushroom, I thought it would be a good idea to cook some up for my inlaws, who were coming for the weekend to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday.

So I went online to my favorite French recipe website and found a recipe for quiche aux cèpes. Perfect, I thought. A quiche. This will be easy peasey.

The recipe called for four big cèpes. Hubbie picked up some impressive ones from our local LeClerq supermarket. With a very serious expression he said, "Do you know how much they cost? [Dramatic pause.] Over six euros EACH." I stuck them in the fridge as he muttered, "It better be a good quiche."

The next morning, I started to prepare my ingredients. Suddenly, while watching me turning over the cèpes with a quizzical expression, Hubbie became filled with fear and told me to wait while he googled how to handle the mushroom.

How to handle the --? But it's a mushroom, for crying out loud! Okay okay, I'll wait until you find some guidelines.

Little did we know what a pandora's box that would open.

First of all, we should not have put the mushrooms in the fridge. Not sure why, but that's what several people said.

Secondly, we should not have picked cèpes that have greenish spores. Looking under the caps of our four benign-looking cèpes, we saw two had greenish spores. Perhaps they turned green in the fridge, I suggested. Hubbie shrugged. At any rate, the spores need to be taken off before you cook the 'shrooms. This I did with no problem.

Thirdly, big cèpes are most always home to a few maggots. Maggots??? Yes, maggots. I shivered. Again proceeding as recommended, we wrapped the 'shrooms in cling film, turned them upside down and waited for the worms to come gasping out. We waited twenty minutes, and...

Nothing.

The pressure was mounting. What to do? ETA of the inlaws: one hour. Hubbie found additional advice, which we followed without reflection. We were asked to exhale into the plastic so as to reduce the breathable air for the worms. We waited another twenty minutes. About two nearly-strangled worms came wriggling out onto the plastic of one mushroom. No worms came out of the others.

What to do? I got a creeping suspicion there were more worms to be found. Putting on my sushi-chef/samurai/extremely anal attitude, I decided to go ahead and chop them up, examining each piece to annihilate each and every worm in my precious cèpes.

Gone was my ever optimistic, over-confident assumption that cèpes were as wonderfully tame as your friendly button mushrooms.

I worked on three mushrooms until they looked like they had been butchered by a madwoman. Finally, I sheathed my sword. Looking at the score, I had pried out about six worms from each cèpe. Yes, six! It's the stuff of nightmares, believe you me.

Then, I came to the last mushroom.

It looked like a white sponge. There were holes all over it. And now that I had three cèpes under my belt, I knew that did not bode well.

That is when it hit me. How far was I willing to go for taste? The Japanese risk their lives eating blowfish. Would I risk my life serving maggoty mushrooms to my mother-in-law?

I cut up the last mushroom, just as an experiment, without the slightest hope of it being edible. Of course, each hole in its white flesh meant that a worm had marked its path. It was infested. I shivered and started feeling itchy.

What could I do? I thanked heaven we had at least three good cèpes. The recipe then called for a few champignons de Paris (button mushrooms). Whew, I could relax.

Little did I know, my kitchen blunders had not ended there. The quiche was in the oven, but 45 minutes later at 200 C: Noooo! My $30 quiche is still liquid! What is going on?

In all my quiche-making, never had I come across a quiche that needed to be cooked at anything higher than 200 C. But this quiche, which contained plenty of water from the mushrooms, really did need to be cooked at 250! Rather than trust the writer of the recipe, I had automatically glossed over the 250 C and put the oven to 180 C.

I served the "quiche" to my inlaws and my husband said, "I told her to do an omelette aux cepes, but she wouldn't listen..." Thankfully, they have good senses of humor and stomachs of iron. Later, my mother-in-law magnanimously pointed out my fatal flaw: "It says 250 C."

Yes, I thought I had mastered the humble quiche. But instead I got a hefty serving of humble pie.