Jack O'Lantern Vegan Pumpkin Quiche

        

It's the most wonderful time of the year... Halloween!
And what's the most halloweeny food of the all? Pumpkin Pie! And what would make it even more halloweeny? Jack O'Lantern pie crust decoration!
So that's what I made.

Here's the ingredients:
400g flour ( I used spelt flour)
200g margarine or 8tbs oil
1/2 Hokkaido pumpkin
1/2 package smoked tofu
1 leek
500ml soy or oat cream
1 chili pepper
salt & pepper
40g corn starch
        
And the instructions are as follows:
Mix the flour and the margarine or oil with a teaspoon of salt to a smooth dough. Don't mix it too much to receive a nice flaky crust. Put the dough in plastic wrap and place it in the fridge while preparing the rest of the ingredients.
Chop up the smoked tofu into small cubes and fry it for a couple of minutes in a pan with oil until they are crispy and golden brown. Cut up the pumpkin and leek and add those to the frying pan for a couple more minutes.
Pour the soy or oat cream into a bowl, mix in the corn starch and add the salt & pepper to taste. Chop up the chili pepper and add that and the fried tofu, pumpkin and leek to the cream. Give it aquick mix, so some of the pretty orange from the pumkin colours the cream.

Then it's time to get out the dough from the fridge and roll it out to a 5mm thick crust. To transfer the crust to the pie pan roll up the douph on your rolling pin and unroll it onto the pie tin. With the excess rolled out dough I cut out three pumpkin shapes and used a sharp knife carve the faces.
Pour the pumkin mix into the pie crust and add the pumpkin crust decoration on top.
Then bake for 40 minutes at 180°C and let it cool down a little bit afterwards so the starch can thicken (good time to take pictures without the husband judging you too much ;).

And then it's finally time to taste this pumkiny goodness!

        




The quiche was really good and I will definitely make it again this fall! This was the first time I made the crust with oil instead of margarine and the husband really liked it, because it turned out much more flaky than usual.

This post is part of a blogparty with the following lovely bloggers. I'm really excited to see what kind of halloweeny goodness they have thought of and created for this party.
Check out their posts here:
Poison Apples at www.wiesenknopfschreibselei.de
Bloody Spelt Cookies at http://preppie-and-me.de
Ghost Brownies at www.bellezalicious.de
Pumpkin Spice Latte  at www.cockerlifestyleandmore.de
Vegan Pumpkin Soup at www.freiveganlife.com
Ghost Cupcakes at www.lauradreamsofcakes.com

Skull Muffins www.fraupodenco.de

Since we had half a pumpkin and a bit more than a third of the quiche left I made pumpkin soup the next day and it went perfectly with the leftover pumpkin quiche <3
By the way, the pumpkin decoration is diy as well as you may have guessed. I've written about them in my DIY Witches Cauldron post.

        
Are you making anything special for Halloween?
For more spooktacular Halloween content check my 12 Days of Halloween.

Happy Halloween!

DIY Pallet Planter and Balcony Table

Fall is finally here, so it's the perfect time to show you my summer balcony project, right? Right! Maybe it'll inspire you to to a similar project for springtime.

I wanted to do a pallet diy for so long, so when I saw one of these bad boys hanging out next to the trash at our apartment complex I took the chance and made the husband carry it up to the fourth floor for me. Then it was time to think of a good use for it (of course the husband thought I already thought of that..). I definitely wanted it to be a place for my selfgrwn plant babies, but I didn't want to put too much work into it at first, so I just turned it to its side bottom front and placed the plant pots in it ike so:
        
        
Eventually my plants grew up and became too big for their pot and the pallet, so I had to rethink the system. This is what I came up with.
        
I took the pallet and a wooden crate I (luckily) found at the public transit station Friedrichstraße just lying around. My idea was to build a table from the pallet and use the crate as extra shelving. for that I needed to saw up the pallet like so:

Guess what? I sawed everything by hand! It was a ton of work, but lots of fun. Took me a whole afternoon. Then it was time to attach the sawed off ends of the pallet to use as table legs. I used long screws and L-brackets for this in three different spots for each leg to secure the position.
                

Then I had a stable table that fit perfectly in front of our living room window on the balcony. Next I gave it a light sanding and a quick coat of purple and copper spray paint. Lastly I added the wooden crate, gave that a spray paint coat and after letting it dry for an hour the table was ready to be set!
        
        
        
All done! My plants look so much happier and actually have space to grow out and most importantly up! Here's a before and after:

Definitely a big difference. And check out the fruits of my labour below. Sadly not all tomatoes grew ripe as it was a really cold and rainy summer, but I'm still very proud of my homegrown plants and it was great practice for our garden next year!
        
        
Partying at Alt Trifft Neu - Upcycling Blog Party