Meal: crustless quiche, bread machine baguettes, green salad
Cost: about $2 each
Time: 40 minutes in the oven, 15 minutes prep for the quiche, plus some time for the salad and bread machine time for the bread dough
Leftovers: a small chunk of bread that I used for a sandwich for Jeff’s lunch. Apparently, we were hungry. (And salad makings, but I deliberately cut up way more than we would need, so that we would have salad makings for dinner tonight.)
Local ingredients: cheese, eggs, milk, salad greens, tomatoes, green peppers
Organic ingredients: flour, carrots

We’ve talked about quiche before, but last night was a new recipe, and it was definitely a winner; we’ll be sticking to this for our crustless quiche from now on. The recipe came from Simply Recipes, where quite a few of our new recipes come from. Elise features recipes that use whole ingredients, that are generally pretty easy to prepare, and that are easily modifiable, and this quiche was no exception.

The original recipe for this quiche calls for 10 ounces of cheese and a cup of cottage cheese for 5 eggs. That is a heck of a lot of cheese. I love cheese, and I’m not sure that even I can contemplate eating that much cheese at a sitting. So, I used to recipe as an idea and took off. I made the roux, and then once it was cool, added the baking powder and salt, and 1/2 a teaspoon of mustard powder to it, then mixed it into 8 eggs beaten with a third of a cup of milk (to make up for not using the cottage cheese, which would have added some moisture). I stirred in 2 cups (8 ounces) of a mix of shredded colby, vintage cheddar, and muenster, and that was it. (There are too many conflicts between food likes and dislikes with the folks we were do movie night with to do any mix-ins or toppings. Eventually, I’ll get around to buying ramekins, and then we can have customized quiches.) That was it. It went into the oven in an 8×8 dish for the proscribed 40 minutes at 350 degrees, and came out slightly brown and puffy. The end result was creamy and cheesy (I could probably easily cut down on the cheese on the next batch, too, and at one-fourth of the pan coming in at 500 calories, I probably will.) I found it to be slight lighter than my normal quiche - more like a souffle - while Jeff found it to be more substantial than my normal efforts, and liked it a lot more. My cousin and sister also approved, so I think we have a new default recipe.