For those of you who follow us regularly, you know that the little ladies and I like to make and bake something new for each letter we’re learning in home school that week. This past week was Q and as it turns out, there aren’t a lot of foods that start with Q.  Quail, quail eggs, Quesedilla, Quince and Quiche were all I could think of. Probably there’s more, but this was my list.  We decided a quiche would be good, and while I love a sweet onion or delicious dill quiche, momma was craving something real sweet.  So, I googled dessert quiche and the first thing I saw did the trick!  We adapted this French Vanilla Quiche recipe from seriouseats.com and I’m SO glad we did!  Think, sweet vanilla custardy deliciousness baked into a good ol’ flaky pie crust just like grandma’s! Nomnomnomnomnom!

Here’s what you need to make this little quiche baby!

• 1 Pie crust. You can make your own or do what we did & get a refrigerated or frozen pie crust.  There will be enough custard for one deep dish crust or for two regular sized crusts.
• 4 whole eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 cups half and half
• 1 vanilla bean – I learned a little bit about vanilla bean shopping! I looked at 4 places and found that the Private Selection brand at our Dillons grocery store made the least expensive. 2 beans for $10.  I found 1 bean for $9 and the average price seemed to be 2beans for $16. But trust me, it’s worth it!  I’m sure you could use pure vanilla extract if you are unable to hunt down some vanilla beans, but scraping the vanilla from the beans makes you feel cool, and you can decorate the pie with the beans, so there’s that to think about too:D

And here’s what you need do with those ingredients to get this quiche baby ready to put in your mouth! P.S….Don’t eat babies. Eat quiche. We’re making quiche.

1. Place your oven rack in the middle position and preheat your oven to 375°F. Place your pie crust into your 9-inch pie plate, tucking back edges of crust or making it real fancy nice!

2. In a big ol’ bowl, whisk together eggs, egg yolks, and sugar until the color lightens up and is real nice and frothy, around 2 minutes. Whisk in flour, then your half and half, scrape all that vanilla goodness out of the vanilla bean and mix everything up real good. Prepare for your kitchen to smell amazing!
3. Pour your delicious vanilla goodness into your crust. Place pie plate on rimmed baking sheet and bake until egg mixture is puffed and a light gold.  Cook for about about 55 minutes to 1 hour for the deep dish and about 30 minutes for two of the shallower pie crusts . Remove from oven, leave the room, tell your self no for 15 minutes (plenty of time to change into stretchy pants and get some coffee) and then come back, take a pretty picture, top with anything you might like (we did fresh sliced strawberries) and slice it up and eat that quiche!! It is so good warm or refrigerated a few hours later..and then a few more hours after that, a few more after that and even a little after that too!

   Enjoy friends!!!

In our home, we make a lot of playdough  In fact, we’ve never actually purchased playdough. Making playdough is super fun, super easy, super inexpensive, the girls love to help make it and there are endless possibilities of how you can incorporate learning into playdough play.

 Without going into too much detail, essential oils & playdough can be used for some pretty amazing stuff!  While I’m mostly sharing this for the recipe, here are a few benefits!

So, the way we incorporate playdough into our learning and our learning into our playdough is by by making and using it on rainy Mondays like today making or making it fit our theme for the week. We try and learn and master a new letter each week. We do crafts, read books, play games and make foods that correspond with the letter we’re learning that week.  Some of the ways we’ve done this in the past is Lavender scented, Lavender colored playdough for the week of L while listening to the song Lavender’s Blue on repeat for 2 hours:D

You can talk about how the playdough feels, how it smells, how it makes them feel, what they like and even what they don’t like about it. You can incorporate fun playdough tools, thrifted baking and kitchen items, pieces of nature collected outside and many household items to create lots of different ways to experience learning with playdough.

We’ve done this with lots of letters, colors, music and essential oil blends! We then practice making the letter we’re learning and mold the various items they can think of that start with that letter. I’m always amazed at some of the stuff they come up with… Each essential oil has different impacts on the mood. If we’re needing a little energy, citrus will help. If we need to calm down than lavender helps!

Get creative and have fun! When our letter was P, we made our own Peace essential oil blend, colored the playdough a bit pink, peach & purple (their idea) and the girls made pretend pregnant molds by pressing the dough into teaspoons (also their idea!):D.  They’re kind of still obsessed with all things pregnancy and birth🙌 They almost always make outfits for their barbies, creative foods and animals and they’ve even crafted playdough into jewelry.

Plus, they’ll play for plenty long enough for you to snap some photos and edit them while enjoying a nice honey latte:D

We’ve experimented with a few recipes and here is our favorite!

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

2 cups colored water

1 cup salt

1-2  tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

5-15 drops of essential oils of choice

Directions:

1. You’re going to add all your ingredients, minus the essential oils, in a large saucepan and mix real good until combined.
2. Once it’s mixed real good, place pan over medium heat. Use a spatula to stir until all your dough turns into a pretty ball. Sometimes we add a little more coloring in this stage until we get the color we want.
3. As soon as you’re ball is formed, remove from heat and cool on parchment paper. NOTE: Don’t overcook as your playdough will get all dry and gross:( If it seems a little dry, rub your pretty playdough ball down with more olive oil. I usually add another tablespoon just so it’s good and moist. (Worst word ever, but I didn’t know what other word to use.)
4. Once your playdough has cooled down, add your essential oils and knead until combined and as smelly good as you want.  Depending on the oils I use, sometimes 5 drops is enough and sometime I need 20.  Just play around with your oil blends until you get it how you want.
5. Voila! Beautiful essential oil playdough! Store in an airtight container for lots of playdough fun! We store our playdough in thrifted air tight glass containers and keep our dough and utensils stored in pretty picnic baskets within their reach so they can take it out to play during free time, which is basically all day:D