Happy June! Summer has kicked off already in our neighborhood. Last weekend Eleanor, who is ten-and-a-half and lives across the street from us, opened her famous lemonade stand. We like to support youthful endeavors, so we gamely trotted over in the morning for our annual Solo cups of Wyler’s lemonade and Eleanor’s hand-crafted beaded friendship bracelets. The summer games have begun!

What will your summer drink be? We are entering the glorious time of the year when the sun sets late, the fireflies abound, and the sun is warm, but not yet baking us into gooey sweaty messes. It’s time for sitting on the back porch, talking about summer, and admiring Eleanor’s handiwork.

Summer means vacations, trips to the beach, sand in the car, trashy romance novels, blockbuster Tom Cruise movies, and cool drinks. With snacks. I suppose we can and do enjoy those things all year round, but the summer of my imagination is always viewed through those IG-perfect rosy glasses – in crisp white linen, with lightly freckled noses, always mosquito-free, with a side of lobster rolls and crispy fries. Yumsters.

Last year orange wines were popular among the younger cocktail set. And the perpetual favorite rosé wines proliferate. Everyone who is anyone has their own rosés now. For example: Château Miraval (Brad Pitt), and Invivo x SJP (Sarah Jessica Parker) have their monikers on some very pretty bottles of rosé. Celeb Rosés

A few summers ago Mr. Sanders found a tasty, inexpensive green wine at the grocery store, a Vinho Verde. It young and fresh, and so light because it has a very low alcohol content. Heavens. I didn’t care for it much, because I am true blue and loyal to my cheap, full-bodied and buzzy Chardonnay (if you know someone at the Kendall Jackson Vineyards, please let them know that I would be an excellent shill) and I found it too light. I am very comfortable in my rut. But you should poke around the wine shelves and see for yourself.

This summer I am going to make the effort to experiment with a variety of drinks. I might not appreciate all the trade war dramas playing out in Washington, but I have seen other news which can affect us, too: Maryland and Delaware have elected to opt for the same official state cocktail – the Orange Crush. And have you heard the news flash that Popeye’s has released their summer drink for 2025 – Pickle Lemonade? Whoa. Pay attention, Eleanor: Pickle lemonade is the new Wyler’s.

The official state cocktail of Maryland is the Orange Crush, as declared by Governor Moore. It’s a combination of vodka, triple sec, orange juice, and lemon-lime soda. I imagine it has a whopper of an alcohol content. Maryland wins the Orange Crush competition – of course. Maryland invented it for heaven’s sake. In Ocean City. Maryland vs. Delaware:

I always find that orange juice is a little too sweet, but then again, I might not be a good judge because I loved Tang as a child. Remember Tang? It probably had more chemicals and artificial sweeteners than all the Halloween candy I ever consumed as a tot. For the sake of professionalism, I will have to try an Orange Crush, or two.

More in the interest of science I will also be trying the Pickle Lemonade, spiked and un-spiked. Luckily we still consider pickles to be green leafy vegetables in this household, so we always have a jar or two of Vlasics in the fridge. If Maryland has an official cocktail, maybe I need one, too.

I like a slice or two of pickle on my fried chicken sandwiches, so mixing some pickle juice into a glass of lemonade might not taste as peculiar as it sounds. And it sounds a little more exotic and appetizing than chugging a glass of Gatorade to refresh and re-hydrate. Stock up on pickles. Stock up on orange juice — summer is almost here.

“Summer’s here, I’m for that
I got my rubber sandals, got my straw hat
I got my cold beer, I’m just glad that I’m here…”
— James Taylor

Here is a free article from the New York Times: Pickle Lemonade

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

Suddenly they are everywhere — blueberries. June is about to be busting out all over, summer is almost here, and if you listen carefully you’ll hear the blueberries ripening. Little globules of vitamin-rich blue goodness! ’Tis the season to revel in local blueberries!

Local blueberries are ripe for the picking, as they say. We don’t have to worry about those tariffs, for the moment. Instead of waiting for imports from Mexico, Peru or Chile we can wander into a You-Pick-It blueberry farm, and spend some time in nature, plucking our own sweet breakfast jewels. Deelish.

Mr. Sanders starts each day in a healthy manner – unlike me – who still yearns for those good old days of cold pizza for breakfast. No, Mr. Sanders always sets a good example, and manfully tosses a handful of glistening blueberry goodness on top of his bowl of leaves and twigs every morning. Sometimes he just rinses them off in a wire strainer, and drops them into a bowl for easy munching. Or he mixes them with other berries and some yogurt. Sometimes he ladles a handful on top of a bowl of overnight oats and has a healthy, crunchy breakfast. Luke the omnivore wonder dog does not care for blueberries, strangely enough, so he won’t be staring up at you with a deep-throated yearning for the blueberries in your breakfast bowl. Not that you won’t feel his silent reproach for your dubious food choices. Now would be a good moment for you to fetch him a yummy dog treat. Dogs and Blueberries

I like my blueberries as a special component: in piping hot, just baked blueberry muffins, with melting Irish butter, and the Sunday papers. Or in blueberry pancakes, with warm blueberry bursts in each mouthful. Nigel Slater has a divine recipe for blueberry French toast:

Or, with a little planning, you can bake a breakfast cake. How perfect is cake for breakfast? A blueberry breakfast cake is the best way to start a day

Surely the ultimate blueberry moment is the first bite of blueberry pie. You might prefer your pie open-faced, lattice work, crumble, or with a second crust. It’s going to be a long summer, so try every permutation. Our friends at Food52 have done lots of research, and lots of baking. I rely on them to guide me through these treacherous blueberry pie waters: Food52 Blueberry Ideas

Father’s Day is in a couple of weeks (June 15th this year). You can start your celebration with warm, butter-dripping blueberry muffins at breakfast! Later on, how about a colorful salad? For a delightfully cool lunch salad, try pairing blueberries with cucumbers and some feta cheese. Blueberry Cucumber Salad

Later on we will be having cocktails, too, of course. John Derian is as stylish and clever as folks come, and this is his recipe for a Blueberry Smash. Deelightful!

Visit the farmers’ market of your choice to get lots of local blueberries and other produce:

Chestertown Farmers’ Market


St. Michaels FreshFarm Market


Centreville Farmers’ Market


Easton Farmers Market


Lockbriar Farm
10051 Worton Road, Chestertown, MD 21620

Redman Farms
8689 Bakers Lane, Chestertown, MD 21620

“Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.”
—Stephen Fry

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

Here we are again—on the cusp of summer, on the eve of grilling season, keeping watch for fireflies, swatting early mosquitoes, and planning the Memorial Day cookout. I’m looking forward to a gathering of old friends on the back porch, with songs from college playing in the background as we laugh and scarf bowls of chips like it was still the good old days of few consequences.

As we catch up with our merry band, hearing about new babies, new homes, young lives in big cities, I wonder, as one does, if we made the right choices along the way. Maybe we would have been happier with an urban life. And then I read magazine articles and feel smug about our life decisions. I was never destined to be a West Village Girl – looking for frozen espresso martinis while posting influencer content to TikTok. I was never going to be someone who worked in finance, and I never would have strolled into the short-lived Brooklyn Mischa restaurant this Memorial Day Weekend, and plunked down $29 for a hot dog. Nope. I think I plunked down about $29 for our entire cookout. For that kind of money, I’d rather learn to love caviar.

Instead meeting at an au courant bistro in the West Village in NYC, we will gather on the back porch, where we have a few Adirondack chairs (which are never as comfortable as they look). I love these al fresco nights, as we elude those pesky mosquitoes and enjoy fluttering candles and swaying strings of white lights. We can watch the last of the sun’s rays gilding the tops of the pecan trees, and the bellies of the robins as they squabble in the back yard. There is time to slow down and the enjoy the lengthening navy shadows. There is no television news in the background. It is a pleasantly warm and humid summer evening. Far away you might hear a hint of distant thunder growling.

We aren’t going to serve anything extravagant this weekend, just our old reliable favorites: hamburgers, hot dogs, corn-on-the-cob, potato salad, green salad, and strawberry short cake. Also, chips and classic 1950s French onion dip, with WASPy bowls of radishes, cucumber spears, celery and carrots for karmic balance. There will be beer. No Aperol spritzes or frozen espresso martinis. Welcome to summer. Welcome to ordinary America— no fancy pants West Village girls here!

This is the best sort of holiday meal, one that doesn’t require numerous trips to the grocery store for elusive exotic ingredients, or perusing cookbooks. Jacques Pepin and Alice Waters can sit sullenly on the bookshelf – these are tried and true dishes that vary little from year to year, or really from family to family. I sometimes miss the dry, charred, hockey-puck-hamburgers of my childhood, but I must say that Mr. Sanders can flip a mean burger. And I still make my mother’s potato salad. Maybe you’ll grill brats, or have a watermelon or lemon meringue pie. Maybe your family always grills chicken. Be sure to enjoy yourselves!
We will be trying one new dish as Mr. Sanders does love a challenge: grilled artichokes. In preparation, he has even cleaned the grill for the new season. Bring on summer! We’ll see you at the farmers’ market!

Food52 Grilled Artichokes

Food and Wine Grilled Artichokes

The Schmidty Wife Artichokes

We will be sticking close to home this weekend – we are painting a bathroom for a well-intentioned family project – so we will be flipping our burgers and watching the fireflies dance here. Heat up your charcoal briquets, enjoy your crab feast, fry up a batch of chicken, spike a cold watermelon, melt a batch of s’mores, enjoy the Chestertown Tea Party, wave your flags at the parades, and remember the brave souls who gave their all.

“Summertime is always the best of what might be.”
― Charles Bowden

Hints from the New York Times for effective grill cleaning.

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

Ah, late spring. It is a beautiful time of the year. The fireflies are beginning to sparkle in the blue twilight of the back yard. A bunny is enjoying chowing down on the new grass in the front yard. There are even more wondrous smells these days for Luke the wonder dog on our daily tours of the neighborhood’s hedges and flower beds. The long days stretch slowly toward the last day of school. There are too many awards nights, school field trips, graduation parties and political protests to attend – who has time for normal, sit-down family dinners? For that matter, who has time to plan those meals? Maybe Martha, but don’t forget, she has staff on hand. The rest of us, running our own tiny on-a-shoestring-enterprises, need to plan on the fly. Which is why I am suggesting deelish Sammies for every occasion. They can be made ahead, they are portable, they are economical, and they are filling. And they are easy to accessorize.

In this complicated, overly-scheduled, anxiety-fraught, spread sheet-specific life, don’t be a Stanley Tucci. I know, Stanley Tucci is sweet and winsome. He has sparkling eyes, and tasteful scarves, and the jovial air of bonhomie. He is a foodie. He got us through COVID with his videos of nice, stiff homemade Negronis. We loved him in Julie and Julia. He helped us understand the mysterious ways of the Vatican in the timely film Conclave. If I see him passionately swallow one more obscure regional Italian delicacy on yet another travel show, I will surely puke. I have maxed out on the ubiquity of Stanley. He was quoted in a recent Food and Drink Magazine about the most delicious sandwich he has ever eaten. He didn’t wax poetical or nostalgic about his mother’s homemade tuna salad sandwiches, or the prosaic turkey sandwich he could have had at his local London pub. He didn’t mention even the legendarily expensive burger from Balthazar in New York City. No. Stanley Tucci’s best sandwich was street food in Rome. It was a smoked cow tongue, with Romaine lettuce, and homemade mayonnaise, on local bread. Surely, without a doubt, it was the best he has ever tasted. We cannot top that. We cannot possible compare our own boring, drab, suburban life with his glittering world.

But we can try. Luke, Mr. Sanders, and I are not going to Italy any time soon. In fact, cooking has been a challenge this week, because we have been painting the kitchen cabinets, and the long pine table is crammed with boxes of silverware, plates, bowls, cookie sheets, wooden spoons, measuring cups and boxes of foil, Saran Wrap, and parchment paper. It’s hard to find anything. But there is a cutting board around here, someplace, and a good bread knife. We don’t need homemade mayo. Bring on the tomatoes and the fresh mozzarella, Stanley.

When you are driving home from a graduation, or get stuck in traffic going to the beach, you can pull over along the way, and reach inside your souvenir Trader Joe’s insulated bag, and pull out a homemade burrata caprese sandwich. You won’t need homemade mayo. In fact, some Utz Sour Cream & Onion chips and a Diet Coke can only enhance your foodie experience. Go ahead – you can be an Eastern Shore original, and have Utz Crab Chip seasoned chips. (Stanley will probably opt for Italian chips: San Carlo – PiùGusto Porchetta. Ewwww. )

The Spy Test Kitchen Caprese Sandwich.

Don’t take my word for it – here are some more Deelish Italian sandwiches for your own armchair travel experience.

Here is the interview with our worldly, movie star pal, Stanley Tucci:

“There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound.”
― Douglas Adams

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil, and ink.

There are many issues that can drive us nuts here in the Spy Test Kitchens. We are only human, after all, except for Luke the wonder dog, who is sanguine and tolerant of almost anything but a knock on the door, or a passing UPS truck. We like simple, reliable, and tasty. We do not like recipes that call for extraordinary ingredients that can only be found in exotic Middle Earth market stalls one week out of the year, or in haute organic Brooklyn food co-ops. Our time is valuable, and who wants to waste it searching for obscure and expensive ingredients? Not us. We have books to read, streamers to watch, and garden weeds to ignore. Please – be sure that the ingredients are easily found.

As you wander through the farmers’ market, or the more prosaic grocery store produce department, these warm spring days, you will see piles of lovely, gleaming, jewel-like fruits and vegetables, and you can channel the excitement of all the fancy pants food editors: suddenly, you can see why Bon Appétit has a page about the beauty of rhubarb. Or why Felicity Cloake of The Guardian is practically waxing poetical about Rhubarb Crumble

Just look at that rhubarb! Look at the chartreuse greens – the shocking rosy pinks! Rhubarb could be a charming vintage Lilly Pulitzer print, without all the cumbersome Palm Beach pretenses. Rhubarb, that coy herbaceous perennial, is here, but it isn’t going to last forever, so get out your thinking caps and pre-heat your ovens.

I was super pleased to find this recipe for rhubarb scones on the Food52 website. Rhubarb Scones I had gone off on an internet stroll, looking for something timely and spring-y for this week’s column. I like rhubarb. It reminds me of spring, and makes me think about strawberries and cream and picnics and garden parties I have only read about. Which leads to clotted cream and scones and a long ago tea I had with a dear chum in a churchyard in England. So much of food enjoyment is thinking of connections, and remembering ideal meals and happy times.

What is best about this recipe is that it is highly adaptable. What? Your grocery store doesn’t have rhubarb? Rhubarb hasn’t ripened yet in your area, so there isn’t any at the farmers’ market? Don’t panic – substitute! The comments on this recipe in Food52 are loaded with helpful suggestions. Use strawberries! Use peaches! Use strawberry jam! Try frozen rhubarb. We are baking the scones, after all, which transforms the fruit. We can wait until June to decorate these scones with tiny fresh strawberries and raspberries. Right now we need some comfort food, and we need it fast.

Growing up, we had a couple of rhubarb plants growing in the lower garden, near the compost pile by the barn. We never ate the rhubarb. My mother was never going to serve Rhubarb Spritzers, so I think it they were plants she inherited from the original owners of the house. Like the Jack-in-the-Pulpit by the back steps and the bank of Lilies of the Valley by the stone wall. I have to use store-bought (or farmers’ market-bought) rhubarb, as yet tariff-free.

Every spring there are cascades of recipes for rhubarb and strawberry pies, cakes, jams, lemon bars, tarts, crumbles and fools. Which are all wonderful and delicious, but this year I want to try a couple of new recipes; where rhubarb isn’t just a novelty ingredient, but is included as a subtle and unusual spring flavor.

Martha has a very posh rhubarb dessert, if you stumble upon a great stash of rhubarb: Rhubarb Pavlova

Maybe you want to have coffee instead of tea? Here is a Brooklyn coffee cake recipe that you can try. There is nothing in it that can’t be found at our less-than-fancy corner grocery store: Rhubarb Coffee Cake

And you can re-visit the 1950s with a rhubarb upside down cake, with help from Betty Crocker. Sometimes a cake mix is worth it! Rhubarb Upside Down Cake

More modern is a Rhubarb Pound Cake

But I am saving the best for last – a Rhubarb Collins. This is the way to enjoy spring, a nice tall Collins glass in hand as you sit on the back porch, watching the cardinals dart from the bird feeder, while that bunny sits calmly in the back yard, nibbling the grass that you had no intention of mowing today. Pour some more Champagne, please! Let there be fireflies!

Rhubarb Collins
1 stalk rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 1/2 -inch pieces (about 3/4 cup)
1/2 cup sugar
2 ounces gin
1 ounce lemon juice
2 to 4 ounces Champagne

Make a simple syrup with the rhubarb and sugar: combine the rhubarb and sugar with 3/4 cup water in a small pot and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to moderately low and simmer until slightly thickened and bright pink in color, about 20 minutes. Let the syrup cool then pour through a colander set over a bowl. Press down gently and toss the solids. (The rhubarb simple syrup can be made in advance and stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to one week.)

Combine one ounce of the rhubarb simple syrup in a cocktail shaker with the gin and lemon juice. Fill the shaker with ice and shake vigorously until completely mixed. Strain into a chilled highball glass and top with Champagne or Prosecco. Add a straw, and a strawberry for decoration. Drink. Repeat. Enjoy. Spring is fleeting!

“Well, art is art, isn’t it?
Still, on the other hand, water is water!
And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” —Groucho Marx

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil, and ink.

Food Friday is on the road this weekend, so you Gentle Readers will have to put up with a re-run of my favorite Easter lemon cheesecake. Mr. Sanders and I are heading to a family Easter gathering in Florida, and Luke the wonder dog is off for a much deserved vacay of his own with his dog pals at the spa. Please indulge me and enjoy our making our favorite Easter dessert. Play nicely at your Easter egg hunts, and let the little ones find the eggs. You can sip on a Bloody Mary or two.

At Easter I like to haul out my dear friend’s lemon cheesecake recipe, and reminisce, ruefully, about the year I decorated one using nasturtiums plucked fresh from the nascent garden, which unfortunately sheltered a couple of frisky spiders. Easter was late that year and tensions were already high at the table, because a guest had taken it upon herself to bring her version of dessert – a 1950s (or perhaps it was a British World War II lesson in ersatz ingredients recipe) involving saltines, sugar-free lime Jell-O, and a tub of Lite Cool Whip. The children were divided on which was more terrifying: ingesting spiders, or many petro chemicals?

I am also loath to remember the year we hosted an Easter egg hunt, and it was so hot that the chocolate bunnies melted, the many children squabbled, and the adults couldn’t drink enough Bloody Marys. The celery and asparagus were limp, the ham was hot, and the sugar in all those Peeps brought out the criminal potential in even the most decorous of little girls. There was no Miss Manners solution to that pickle.

Since our children did not like hard-boiled eggs, I am happy to say that we were never a family that hid real eggs for them to discover. Because then we would have been the family whose dog discovered real nuclear waste hidden behind a bookcase or deep down in the sofa a few weeks later. We mostly stuck to jelly beans and the odd Sacajawea gold dollar in our plastic Easter eggs. It was a truly a treat when I stepped on a pink plastic egg shell in the front garden one year when I was hanging Christmas lights on the bushes. There weren’t any jelly beans left, thank goodness, but there was a nice sugar-crusty gold dollar nestled inside it. Good things come to those who wait.

We won’t be hiding any eggs (real or man-made) this year. Instead we will have a nice decorous finger food brunch, with ham biscuits, asparagus, celery, carrots, tiny pea pods, Prosecco (of course) and a couple of slices of lemon cheesecake, sans the spiders, sans the lime Jell-O and Cool Whip. And we will feel sadly bereft because there will be no jelly beans, no melting chocolate and no childish fisticuffs.

Chris’s Cheesecake Deluxe
Serves 12

Crust:
1 cup sifted flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 egg yolk
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Filling:
2 1/2 pounds cream cheese
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
1 3/4 cups sugar
3 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 eggs
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup heavy cream

Preheat oven to 400°F
Crust: combine flour, sugar and lemon rind. Cut in butter until crumbly. Add yolk and vanilla. Mix. Pat 1/3 of the dough over the bottom of a 9″ spring form pan, with the sides removed. Bake for 6 minutes or until golden. Cool. Butter the sides of the pan and attach to the bottom.

Pat remaining dough around the sides to 2″ high.
 Increase the oven temp to 475°F. Beat the cream cheese until it is fluffy. Add vanilla and lemon rind. Combine the sugar, flour and salt. Gradually blend into the cream cheese. Beat in eggs and yolks, one at a time, and then the cream. Beat well. Pour into the pan. Bake 8-10 minutes.

Reduce oven heat to 200° F. Bake for 1 1/2 hours or until set. Turn off the heat. Allow the cake to remain in the oven with the door ajar for 30 minutes. Cool the cake on a rack, and then pop into the fridge to chill. This is the best Easter dessert ever. This recipe makes a HUGE cheesecake! You will be eating it for a week. At least.

Perfect Bloody Marys

“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

It is quite definitely spring. Our trees are leafing out, the dogwood is starting to flower, and tulips are bouncing in the cool April breeze. Everything is looking green and tender – although I was worried about frost overnight because I have planted four stout young tomato plants in the raised garden bed.Our summer tomato sandwiches depend on spring weather. Luke the wonder dog has a spring in his creaky step these mornings – the bushes along our walking route smell extra delicious this spring. Everything is fresh and new, ripe for discovery. We rescued a tiny green turtle the other day, doing a good deed as we got in our daily steps.

Mr. Sanders has been doing yeoman’s work out back – weeding the pachysandra bed, trimming the hedges, fertilizing the lawn – any excuse to be outside in the fresh air. I wander through and pluck violets before he reaches them. I have been replanting the window boxes with hot pink geraniums, vivid clusters of cobalt lobelia and white clouds of sweet alyssum. I’ve stuffed draperies of hot pink petunias in the planters on the front porch. And sadly, I have picked the last of this season’s daffodils.

We sat down around seven last night for dinner, just as the moon was rising and the sun was setting. The last of the daffodils were stuffed in a jam jar on the table. We didn’t need candles, but still we lighted them, because it is spring, and we could gaze out at the newly weeded pachysandra bed, which was bathed in golden light. I hope someone was enjoying a beauteous sunset, even though we could only see streaks of pink over the neighbor’s roof. The robins strutted across the back lawn, grubbing happily.

And what about the food? Who wants to stand over a stove when the garden beckons? It’s time to bring some springtime to our dinners (also very handy for leftovers for breakfast and lunch). Bring on the quiches.

This is seasonal, and oh, so lovely: Sweet Pea and Ham Quiche

You can trust Martha: Martha’s Quiche

Quiche Lorraine, or however you choose to fill yours…

Preheat oven to 375°F
Ingredients for 1 quiche – serves 4
1 baked pie shell (store-bought is fine and dandy)
1 cup half and half
3 eggs
6 slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled
One onion, chopped
1 cup grated Gruyère or Swiss cheese, more if you like your quiche stretchy and cheesy
Salt and pepper
1 pinch fresh, ground nutmeg

Brown the chopped onion in a little of the bacon fat that you have reserved. Or butter or olive oil, remember to be loose and enjoy the baking event! Add the onion and the bacon to the pie shell. Scatter the grated cheese with abandon and artistry. Beat the eggs, cream, salt and pepper and the nutmeg until your arm is tired. Pour the mixture into the pie shell. Bake for 40 minutes, or until the top looks pleasingly golden brown. (I like to bake quiches on a baking sheet, because I have a tendency to spill.)
When you re-heat the quiches, bake at 350°F for about 20 minutes.

Other ingredients to consider adding to the mix: fresh thyme, ham, broccoli, spinach, mushrooms, goat cheese, leeks, sausage, salmon, shrimp or good Maryland crab! Also consider this dish as a breakfast possibility.

Quiche has been much maligned for the wimp factor and for impugning American manhood. Pshaw. Quiche is quick, easy, delicious and is a four seasons kind of food. Quiche is as welcome as the New Year’s Day hangover breakfast pick-me-up, as it is at a warm summer evening’s supper, with a salad, and a little cheap white wine. It will go in someone’s lunchbox, and is a reassuring friend to find sitting in the fridge at 3:00 in the morning, when you are driven from bed with tariff anxieties. Quiche.

Quiche Lorraine has long been a WASPy luncheon speciality, mostly because those WASPs are looking for something delicious and easy to prepare. Who doesn’t love bacon, cheese, and cream? I do apologize, vegans, but that heady combo is a religion unto itself. There are vegan alternatives…
Vegan Quiche

The quiche recipe I followed called for a mere 4 pieces of bacon. I am sorry, but that is not enough bacon. I used 8, crunchy, aromatic slices, which I had baked on a cookie sheet at 425° F for 10 minutes. I also used half and half, and not full-on heavy cream, just because I’d like to make it to 2026 without a major cardiac incident befalling any of us. I also used cubes of cheese from a block of grocery store brand Swiss. The way prices are soaring, Gruyére and Jarlsberg have become a just too expensive. Tariffs. And, because no one will ever notice, I used a store-bought pie shell. I know my limitations, and I just can’t bake an attractive pie crust. They always look like the bad pots I threw during my pitiful college year in ceramics; sad, lopsided, mangled pieces. Here is a gift recipe from the New York Times:

Here is a good compendium of quiches, which will encourage you to explore the inner recesses of your fridge, and use up the trace amounts of spinach, broccoli, taco meat, asparagus, feta cheese and bits of potato lurking there: Leftovers for Quiche And key to the quiche’s attraction is its ability to be reheated. Please, do not use the microwave! Reheating Quiche

Go outside and roll on the grass, like Luke the wonder dog. Spring has sprung, the grass is riz.

“The first day of spring is one thing and the first spring day is another.
The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.”
― Henry Van Dyke

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.