Filipino Quiche – Longanisa and Camote Tops

I asked my wife what she wanted for dinner and she quickly responded quiche. To which I mentally said, “How the heck am I going to make a quiche.” Well, not that I haven’t done it in the past; it’s just that it takes a while for me to make one or at least so I thought.

I quickly checked up the ingredients list and went to the store. For quiche, I believe that a good set of quality ingredients makes it taste better. I know some will disagree with me and just use last night’s dinner to make use of left overs (that’s for another day, it works but not when you want to go for quality). This round I wanted to do something different. Earlier in the day I was chatting with one of my Filipino cooking mentors and we were talking about the evolution of Filipino food. So I was inspired to do some fusion—let’s use longanisa and camote tops.

Part of this is that my garden has a fresh set of camote tops and I didn’t know what else to do with them. For those of you who don’t know, camote tops are just the leaves from the sweet potato plant. Cooking them can be difficult but the trick is to pick the leaves that are new to the vine. This is really a spin of the standard spinach and ham quiche.

I chopped the longanisa and camote tops and made the quiche according to the following recipe:

Ingredients

• 1   9 inch refrigerated piecrust, fitted to a 9 inch glass pie plate
• 1 1/2 cups shredded Gruyere cheese
• 1 lb cooked longanisa crumbled
• 2 cups chopped fresh comote tops
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 6   large eggs beaten
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375.  Combine the eggs, cream, salt, and pepper in a food processor or blender. Layer the comote tops,longanisa, and cheese in the bottom of the pie crust, then pour the egg mixture on top. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes until the egg mixture is set. Cut into 8 wedges.

Tips

You don’t have to use all that cheese. Good cheeses like Gruyere don’t need the help.

I made extra for my wife’s coworkers and they loved it. Give it a try. I know I’ve done a variation where I used Spam but that didn’t give me a wow factor as the longanisa.

Enjoy!