whomever came up with bacon, i would like to thank

So my mum was coming to visit, which seems to always provoke me to aspire to cookery heights previously un-thought of. This time it was quiche, full of cheese and bacon (which I had only cooked for the first time last Sunday) and asparagus (which I had
never attempted before) as well as a dessert (strawberry tart with a chocolate/ricotta/mousse/cream filling), naturally.
The way I seem to be settling into cooking revolves around a sudden inspiration, and a lot of internet searching (i.e. how to cook asparagus, which I might add comes up with some interesting stuff) and then sort of cobbling it together from that. So I looked at several quiche recipes from which I took the bacon and asparagus idea, and basic cooking temp/time and then improvised from there. First I started out with crusts.

One for the quiche, in a pie pan, and one for the dessert, in a tart pan. Next I cooked asparagus, with butter and salt and pepper. It smelled amazing. I am so thrilled this was so easy, and I will most surely be integrating asparagus into my cooking in the future as it has now been demystified.

At the same time I was cooking the bacon and onions (full stove huh. I wish I had another arm sometimes), pre-cooking the crust, and mixing up the filling. Which was mostly egg, cream, and ricotta cheese. Oh and some grated swiss as well. This filling was concocted out of the various dairy products I had in the fridge, which just happened to be ricotta and swiss. An interesting combination and one I may not have attempted otherwise. How fortuitous.

When the asparagus, bacon and onions were all cooked, I dumped them all unceremoniously into the crust.

And then poured the filling over and baked it for half an hour, until the house smelled unbearably good and we were all drooling. And it was bubbling and the cheese was browning.
It was so good in fact, and we were so hungry that I forgot to take a photo of the finished product until it was half eaten, half gone....half left?

I would say it was a success. Thought that may be mostly due to the cheese. And the bacon. I mean how can one go wrong with such glorious ingredients?!
Oh and then there was dessert, or rather, um, first there was dessert. I mean we ate the two in the traditional order, but, due to the fact it had to chill in the fridge the tart was actually made/assembled before the quiche.
So the steps were something like this:
Fresh organic strawberries? Check.

Pre-cooked and uber buttery tart crust? Check.
Chocolate filling? Check.

At this point I spent far to many harrowing minutes slicing the strawberries into infuriatingly imperfect discs. And eventually I acknowledged my failure to make my delicious but un-traditionally shaped berries at all triangular and figured 'hey if it tastes good no one will notice the strawberries are messy' and threw them on as they were (it probably wouldn't occur to anyone but me to see the strawberries as messy at all, but I am just weird like that and wanted a certain shape of slices).


And it didn't look to shabby in the end. Chilled in the fridge while all the quiche prep and cooking and consuming took place, and then was removed, admired briefly and then eaten.

Next time more chocolate. But that's a given. Still, yum indeed.