Last night, we were supposed to have meatball subs and corn. However, the problem with making your own bread on demand is that if something goes wrong, that plan is foobared. Last night, one of my trusty bread recipes let me down for the first time. I don’t know if I mis-measured or if something else happened, but I ended up with a gooey mess that was not going to magically turn into bread.

So, we had over easy egg tacos instead, since I can make tortillas in 15 minutes (plus another 15 or so for the dough to rest). These are just tacos using over easy eggs for the protein, but the yolks pop and mix with the cheese and tomatoes or salsa or whatever else you eat on your tacos, and it’s darned good eats. Cheap, too (something like $2 .50 for the two of us, including the corn, and there were tortillas leftover to send in Jeff’s lunch today.) Num.

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.

Meal: cheese souffle, roasted potatoes, raw asparagus
Cost: about $3 each. (All that cheese…)
Time: half an hour active, 50 minutes baking
Leftovers: half the souffle. I know what I’m having for breakfast. :) The next time I make this, I’ll halve the recipe.
Local ingredients: cheese, eggs, milk, asparagus (from my parents’ garden), potatoes
Organic ingredients: flour

So, I’d never had cheese souffle before, so it went on the list of recipes to try, and we did last night. The verdict: not nearly as hard as I would have thought, very very tasty, and way rich (as in, eat once every six months sort of rich.) It’s basically baked cheese sauce with enough egg to hold it together. For the cheese, I used the vintage cheddar and marble that we get from our farmer’s market, in equal proportions. Since this dish is so cheese-focussed, you’ll want to either use something really good, or something you really like the taste of.

The recipe was from Good Housekeeping Great Home Cooking: 300 Traditional Recipes, which I have out from the library. I like to check cookbooks out of the library before we buy them, to make sure the recipes are as good as they look. I think this one may go on the list to purchase eventually.

If you measure out everything and gather all your equipment beforehand and do things like grate the cheese and seperate the eggs before you start, this will be much easier. This isn’t one of those recipes that you want to be scurrying around saying “Where’d I put the flipping salt?”, a scene that occurs with frightening frequency in our kitchen.

If you don’t have a souffle dish, don’t worry about it. I used an 8×8 baking dish.

Ingredients

- 2 tbs plain bread crumbs or Parmesan cheese (if you have a couple of slices of old bread lying around, take a moment to toast them and chop them up. They’ll be much better than commercial breadcrumbs, and cheaper too.)
- 4 tbs butter
- 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1/4 teas salt
- 1/8 teas ground red pepper
- 1 1/2 cups milk
- 8 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese (2 cups)
- 5 large eggs, separated
- 1 large egg white (I saved the yolk and put it in with Jeff’s eggs this morning)

- Preheat the oven to 325 (which I didn’t do, because all of our baking pans are glass. It didn’t seem to affect the finished product.) Grease your baking dish and sprinkle it with bread crumbs.
- In a 3-quart saucepan that you can use a whisk in, melt the butter over low heat. Stir in the flour, salt, and ground red pepper until they’re nice and blended. Slowly add in the milk, whisking to avoid lumps. (It’s worth being slow about this… a little patience and you end up with a non-lumpy cheese sauce, which is never a bad thing.) Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and boils (I’ll confess, I cranked the heat up to medium. It was never going to boil on low). Stir in the cheddar and stir until it’s melted, then pull the whole thing off the heat.
- In a small bowl, mix 1/2 a cup of the cheese sauce into the egg yolks, then mix that whole thing back into the cheese sauce. Stir quickly to avoid lumps. Set the whole thing aside to cool.
- Meantime, in a large bowl, use a mixer to beat the eggs whites until they’re forming stiff peaks (exactly what it sounds like. When you pull the beaters out, small mountains are left in the egg whites.) Slowly fold the whites into the cheese mixture, just until the whole thing is blended.
- Pour the whole thing into your baking dish. Baking 45 to 55 minutes, or until brown and puffy, and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. (I started from a cold oven and it baked for a little less than 50 minutes. The timer was set to 45, but we didn’t get to it right off.)

That’s it. This was fiddly but actually fairly easy; probably the most annoying bit was separating the eggs. Otherwise, it was just a matter of following the recipe and paying attention. The cookbook has a ton of variations listed for this, and I’m wondering how mini-souffles cooked up in a muffin tin would be.

I served this up with roasted potatoes that cooked with the souffle, and asparagus from my dad’s garden. I was going to do something with it, but it was so good, I ended up just eating it up raw.

I’d like to start making an egg main dish once a week or so this summer - they’re tasty and cheap, but I’m running out of material. Quiche, egg salad, and omelets pretty much covers my range of egg dishes. Anyone have a favorite they wouldn’t mind pointing me at?