Summer Vegetable Frittata

Last week I decided to try my hand at making a frittata.  I had never made one before.  A frittata is an egg dish that you start out cooking on the stovetop, then move to the oven.  I found a recipe for a Greek frittata that I really wanted to try, but when I checked my feta cheese supply, I found only feta dust in the container (who put it back in the fridge like that?).  So I will have to try that one next time.  Instead, I created a frittata using two of my favorite summertime veggies: zucchini and tomatoes.  Yep, still posting zucchini recipes here!  This frittata turned out great.  Here’s how I made it.

Summer Vegetable Frittata

Ingredients:

1 tbsp olive oil

½ large onion, diced

1 medium zucchini, diced

1 small or medium tomato, diced

6 eggs, lightly beaten

½ tsp salt

½ tsp Italian seasoning

½ cup shredded cheese, divided 

Directions:

Preheat broiler.

Heat oil in a 12” broiler-safe skillet over medium heat.  Sauté onion, zucchini, and tomato until onion and zucchini are soft and most of the tomato’s moisture has evaporated.  Add eggs, salt, and Italian seasoning.  Cook for 3 minutes.  Add ¼ cup shredded cheese and stir.  Cook another 3 minutes.  Sprinkle remaining ¼ cup cheese on top, cover, and cook another 3 minutes.  Remove lid and place pan under the broiler.  Broil for a few minutes or until top is lightly browned.  Let rest for 5 minutes, then cut into 6 wedges.  

Makes 3 servings, 2 pieces each.

When I say that it makes three servings, that was when I served it for dinner.  It was our meatless meal of the week, with rolls and a salad.  If you are serving this for breakfast, one piece per person would probably be enough.  I listed Italian seasoning in the recipe, but actually I forgot to put any extra seasoning in it. You could use any kind of seasoning that strikes your fancy.  I think dried dill would go really well with the fresh veggies.  You can also easily switch up the veggies in here. You could use yellow squash instead of the zucchini and bell pepper instead of the tomato; whatever you have on hand.

Frittatas turn out much flatter than their cousin, the quiche.  They don’t puff up as much.  But still very delicious.  I didn’t think my husband would like this all that much.  He doesn’t usually like chunks of tomato in things and I thought he might be getting tired of zucchini, but he proclaimed several times throughout the meal that he loved it.  He loves it when I make egg dishes for our meatless nights because he loves eggs.

I made a special cheese-free mini frittata for my daughter who is allergic to dairy.  Basically the same thing as the one above, minus the cheese, but I used two eggs in an 8″ pan and didn’t put it under the broiler, just cooked it completely on the stovetop.  She gobbled up the whole thing.

I always have plenty of eggs and some kind of veggie on hand, so this will be a great go-to meal on days when I don’t have anything planned. 

Avgolemono (Greek Lemon Egg Soup)

It’s Day Three of The Garden’s Bounty recipe series hosted by Savannah of Hammock Tracks.

Today we are sharing soup recipes.  Soup in the summer?  I know.  I get totally obsessed with soups in the winter, but hardly ever have them in the summer.  But guess what?  I have an awesome summer-friendly soup for you today.  It is super light and lemony and perfect for summertime.  It was March when I made this soup, but it was during that weird March heatwave, so it was like 84 degrees that day.

Have you ever heard of Avgolemono?  Click on that link to read all about it, but the gist of it is that it’s a Greek soup made up of lemon juice and eggs.  Orzo is cooked in chicken broth, then a mixture of lemon juice and eggs is added to thicken the broth.  Meat is optional; I chose some shredded chicken breast for mine.  Topping it off with fresh dill finishes it perfectly.

Avgolemono


6 cups reduced-sodium chicken broth
½ cup orzo, dry
Salt 
5 eggs
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
2 cups shredded cooked chicken
Fresh dill


Directions:
In a large saucepan, bring the broth to a boil.  Add the orzo and cook until tender but still al dente, about 7 minutes. Season with the salt and reduce heat to low; let simmer.


In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs and lemon juice until smooth. Ladle about 1 cup of the hot broth into the egg-and-lemon mixture, whisking to combine.


Add the mixture back to the simmering saucepan. Stir just until the soup becomes opaque and thickens as the eggs cook, 1 to 2 minutes. Add chicken and taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper if necessary.  


Serve warm.


Makes 4 servings.

I know that the dill is technically the only garden produce here, but if you live in Florida, you could count the lemon too. 🙂  This soup is just so perfect for summertime that I had to share.

Be sure to check out all the other great soups below and come back on Friday when I will share with you a delicious summery dessert.

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Roasted Asparagus and Mushroom Quiche

It’s going to be a fun week here on Edesia’s Notebook. I’m participating in another fun blog hop series hosted by Savannah of Hammock Tracks.  This series is called “The Garden’s Bounty” and includes a week’s worth of recipes chock full of fresh garden produce.

Today we are sharing with you casseroles or other hot savory dishes, tomorrow will be salads, Wednesday will be soups, Thursday will be preserves, pickles, or salsas, and on Friday we will share with you some sweet treats to end the week.

The hot savory dish I chose for today is a quiche that I created a few weeks ago.  My family loves quiche (my four-year-old daughter Lena calls it “egg pizza” because it’s wedge-shaped), so I make it for dinner quite often.  I have already shared with you my Broccoli Cheddar Quiche and my Spinach Cheese Quiche with Potato Crust.  I happened to have a handful of mushrooms and some asparagus leftover from some other meals, so I thought they would be fantastic in a quiche together.  Since roasting is the only way I prepare asparagus, I tossed the mushrooms and asparagus together and roasted them for the quiche, maximizing their flavor.  The resulting quiche was amazing.

Roasted Asparagus and Mushroom Quiche


Ingredients:
½ lb. fresh asparagus, trimmed
4 oz. fresh mushrooms, chopped
Olive oil
Kosher salt
6 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup shredded Swiss cheese
½ tsp salt
9” pie crust


Directions:
Preheat oven to 400°.  Line a baking sheet with foil.  Cut asparagus into 1” pieces.  Place asparagus and mushrooms on baking sheet and drizzle with oil.  Sprinkle with salt.  Roast 12 minutes, stirring halfway through.  Remove from oven and let cool.  Reduce oven temperature to 350°.


Combine eggs, cheese, and salt in a medium bowl.  Add roasted asparagus and mushrooms.  Pour into pie crust.  Bake 30-40 minutes or until set.


Makes 6 servings.

This quiche did not disappoint.  The roasted flavor of the veggies comes through nicely and gives the quiche an added depth of flavor.  I’m not a big fan of Swiss cheese, but it is very mellow in this dish and seemed to fit perfectly.  

Check out the great savory vegetable-packed recipes below, and come back tomorrow to see some great fresh-from-the-garden salads!

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Spinach Cheese Quiche with Potato Crust

Quiche is a favorite meal at our house.  And it’s my go-to meatless meal; easy to throw together when I don’t have a new meatless recipe planned to try out.  Earlier this year I shared with you my Broccoli Cheddar Quiche, and in that post, I mentioned that I also make a quiche with a shredded potato crust.  I got lots of feedback about that, people saying that they would love to see that recipe.  Well, I just finally got around to posting it!

Spinach Cheese Quiche with Potato Crust


Ingredients:
3 cups frozen shredded hash brown potatoes, thawed and dried
4 tbsp butter, melted
¼ tsp salt
6 eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1 cup Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
½ tsp salt


Directions:
Preheat oven to 400°.  Place potatoes, butter, and salt in a bowl.  Toss to combine.  Spray a 9” pie plate with cooking spray and spread potatoes evenly in bottom and up the sides.  Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes.


Meanwhile, place eggs, spinach, cheese, and salt in a bowl.  Stir to combine.  Remove potato crust from oven and turn oven temperature down to 350°.  Pour in egg/spinach mixture into crust and bake an additional 30 minutes, or until cooked through.  


Makes 6 servings.

My husband loves this quiche.  Seriously raves about it.  He much prefers this potato crust to the pie crust kind.  I love how the potatoes on the outside get all crispy and crunchy.  I can never get the potatoes on the bottom to get crispy, even with the prebaking, but they still make a really nice crust.

Before baking.

I like to keep frozen hash browns on hand for this very reason.  Quiche makes a great last minute meal because I always have eggs and some kind of veggie I can throw in there.  It’s really fun to experiment with different kinds.

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Raina at Connor’s Cooking chose to make this recipe when she was assigned my blog for the Secret Recipe Club in June 2012.  Click on the button below to check out her post!

Slow Cooker Hash Brown, Ham, and Egg Casserole

I don’t know about you, but whenever I see the word “casserole” in the title of a recipe, I kind of lose interest. “Casserole” brings to mind cream of something soup-covered mushy vegetables mixed with overcooked rice and bland meat. This isn’t that kind of casserole. When you put it together, it’s actually a layered dish, but when you dish it out, it all combines. It ends up being a delicious jumble of hash brown potatoes, ham, egg, and cheese. I got it from Taste of Home.

Slow Cooker Hash Brown, Ham, and Egg Casserole

Ingredients:

32 oz. frozen shredded hash browns, thawed and squeezed dry

3 cups ham, cubed

½ large onion, chopped

1½ cups cheddar cheese, shredded

12 eggs

1 cup milk (2% or whole)

1 tsp salt

Directions:

Layer a third of the potatoes (about 3 cups), ham, onion, and cheese in a 6 qt. slow cooker coated with cooking spray. Repeat layers twice. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, milk, and salt; pour over top.

Cover and cook on high for 30 minutes. Reduce heat to low; cook for 4½ to 5 hours or until a thermometer reads 160°.

Makes 8 servings.

The original recipe didn’t call for thawing and drying the hash browns, but I noticed a large amount of liquid in the finished dish that I figure must have come from the thawing hash browns. It definitely wasn’t grease, so I don’t know what else it could have been. There was so much of it that I had to use a turkey baster to suck it out before serving. So next time I will definitely thaw the hash browns and make sure they are dry before adding to the crock.

Oh and you can use your favorite type of breakfast meat, not necessarily ham. The original recipe called for 1 lb. of cooked bacon, but I wanted to use up my leftover Easter ham. And while I definitely love bacon, ham is one of my favorite breakfast meats. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use cooked crumbled sausage either.

Oh, and a note about the onions: I have a hard time getting onions to cook all the way through in short cook-time dishes like this. I have a husband who doesn’t like onions with any crunch to them, so they have to be completely soft. If I don’t think they will get completely soft, I put them in a microwave-safe bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and microwave for a minute or two. This gets them partially soft so that they finish cooking in the slow cooker. That way I still get all the onion flavor, but without the crunch that my husband dislikes. If you’re not that picky about onions, you can skip that step.

While this makes a lovely breakfast, it’s probably best suited for breakfast-for-dinner or breakfast potluck applications because of the timing. Unless you want to get up at 2 or 3 am to put it all together and turn on the slow cooker. I made this for dinner on Friday and because it makes such a large batch, Jim and I both had it for breakfast Saturday and Sunday mornings, and I finished off the rest of it this morning. So if your jaw drops when you notice that this recipe calls for an entire dozen eggs, just remember that it makes a lot of servings. The original recipe called for using a 5 quart slow cooker, but I barely fit it all in my 6 quart.

Oh, and I don’t know if you’ve tried the slow cooker liners that Reynolds makes. I LOVE those things. My sink is kind of small and I don’t have a sprayer, so it is very difficult for me to wash out my slow cooker crock. I discovered these things and have been using them ever since. The only time I don’t use them is if I am cooking for a potluck. Anyway, if you haven’t tried them yet, this recipe is the perfect time to do so. Eggs and potatoes stick like crazy and I think this would be such a pain to clean up that it would discourage me from making it. So I highly recommend using the liners in this recipe. Otherwise, use lots of Pam!

Sometimes our church does a breakfast theme for evening potlucks during Advent and Lent, so this will be perfect for that.

Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

This winter I instituted a Meatless Monday at our house. Well, it’s not usually Monday (I do slow cooker meals on Monday because of my husband’s work schedule), but we do have one meal a week with no meat. It’s an attempt to save a little money and be healthier by eating more veggies one night a week. I have tried several meatless main dishes now, but one of my go-to meatless meals is quiche and soup. I usually make quiches with spinach, because I really like green veggies in quiche and frozen spinach is a handy thing that I usually have on hand. But last night I felt like doing something different. I had two heads of broccoli in the fridge (we love broccoli, especially roasted), and I thought that would be good in a quiche. I had never used broccoli in a quiche before, and instead of looking up recipes, I just decided to wing it. Here’s what I came up with.

Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Ingredients:

9” pie crust (I used the refrigerated kind)

6 eggs

1 cup broccoli, cut into very small florets (¼ head)

1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded

½ tsp salt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°.

Unroll pie crust and place in pie plate. Trim or crimp edges.

Lightly beat eggs and add broccoli, cheddar, and salt. Pour into pie crust. Bake for 30 – 40 minutes, or until eggs are set.

Makes 6 servings.

Here it is as it came out of the oven:

This is the kind of pie crust I use. If you like making your own crust, be my guest. One thing you’ll most likely never see on this blog is a homemade pie crust recipe. I don’t own a rolling pin and have no intention of doing so in the future! I also make a quiche crust using hash brown potatoes. That’s really good; I’ll blog about that the next time I make it. Jim actually prefers that to the pie crust.

Now, I have to tell you that when I got it all put together, I was a little disappointed in the appearance. It looked kind of weird. It seemed like there were hardly enough eggs to cover the bottom and the broccoli stuck way out. But I put it in the oven anyway. Then I went to the computer and looked up some broccoli quiche recipes. Almost all of them called for cooking the broccoli before putting it in the quiche. Oops. I didn’t do that. I thought the pieces were small enough that they would cook in the half hour in the oven. So, while this thing was baking, I was sure it was going to be a flop.

But, to my amazement, it looked beautiful when it was done (see pic above). The eggs fluffed up very nicely and fit the pie shell perfectly. I know that most people put milk in their quiches, but I don’t. I think the eggs come out the perfect consistency without it. If you haven’t tried it this way, you should just once and see if you like it. The broccoli also pleasantly surprised me. It was cooked, but not mushy. Still had a little bite to it. Perfect. I think that if I had cooked the broccoli before, it would have ended up being mushy.

I served this quiche with my Potato Leek Soup and some pretzel bread I found at the grocery store that afternoon. It was an awesome meal and none of us missed the meat at all.

I will be adding the new category, Meatless Mains, to my list on the right. Do any of you go meatless once a week (or more)? If so, leave a comment and let me know what some of your favorite meatless dishes are.

Spinach, Bacon, and Egg Pizza

This recipe is inspired by one of Ellie Krieger’s recipes, but is not as healthy since I subbed bacon for the prosciutto.

Spinach, Bacon, and Egg Pizza

Ingredients

1 store-bought baked whole wheat thin-crust pizza crust

4 cups baby spinach leaves, roughly chopped

4 slices bacon, chopped

½ cup grated Parmesan (1½ oz.)

4 eggs

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400°.

Cook bacon in skillet and drain off all but 1 tbsp of the drippings. Remove from heat and add the spinach to the pan. Stir until slightly wilted, 1 to 2 minutes.

Place the pizza crust on a cookie sheet. Scatter spinach all over crust. Evenly distribute bacon and Parmesan on top of spinach. Crack eggs onto pizza, roughly positioning 1 yolk on each pizza quarter. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until spinach is wilted and egg whites are just fully cooked. Cut into 4 large slices.

Makes 4 servings.

This was pretty tasty and made an easy meal. I changed a couple of things about it. I used bacon instead of prosciutto and I wilted the spinach before adding it to the pizza. The original recipe said to put the spinach on raw, but I like my spinach a little wiltier than how Ellie’s came out (I saw it on tv). So I wilted it in some of the bacon drippings first. That worked out really well. The only other thing I changed was not adding sliced garlic to it. I didn’t think my husband would like that and since I was using bacon instead of prosciutto, I thought it had enough flavor already.

I did have a couple of problems with it though. First, I burned the first batch of bacon. Oops! I wasn’t feeling well the evening I made this and needed to sit down as the bacon cooked and when I got back it was a little past “done”. So I threw it out and started over.

The other problem I had wasn’t my fault. The eggs didn’t turn out quite right. Two of the yolks broke when I put them on the pizza and I’m not sure why. I think next time I will make more of a “nest” for the eggs to sit in. When the pizza came out of the oven, the egg whites were really rubbery and the yolks were hard as rocks. Not exactly what I was picturing. The original recipe called for a 450° oven. I think that may be a bit too hot. I have rewritten the recipe and will try it next time at 400°. It may take a little longer that way, but hopefully they won’t cook too fast and end up rubbery.

Before adding the eggs.

After adding the eggs. See how the yolks broke? I wonder if I didn’t make enough of a nest for them to sit in.

I won’t even show you the picture of what the whole pizza looked like when it came out of the oven. To be honest, all but one egg (the one in the picture at the top) came out looking less than appetizing. Mostly due to the fact that the yolks broke and because the other yolk that didn’t break got way overcooked.

Double Yolk

Look what I cracked open the other day!  A double-yolked egg!  Neat!

I realized that I had accidentally purchased jumbo eggs instead of my usual large.  I think I was yakking to my mom while I was shopping or something.

Funny thing is, Jim had asked me if I wanted one egg or two.  I couldn’t decide at first, then decided one would be fine.  I guess I was meant to have two after all!

Heart-Shaped Mini Quiches

My mom got me a heart-shaped muffin tin for Valentine’s Day. I decided to make heart-shaped mini quiches for Jim and Hilary (she was visiting for the weekend) this morning. They turned out pretty well, but I will make a few changes the next time I make them. Here’s my amended recipe.

Heart-Shaped Mini Quiches

Ingredients:

4 eggs, lightly beaten

¼ cup milk

¼ tsp salt

½ cup shredde cheese

½ cup frozen spinach, thawed and drained

2-4 slices deli ham, depending on size

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Spray a heart-shaped muffin tin with cooking spray. Combine eggs, milk, salt, cheese, and spinach. Cut heart shapes out of the ham slices, the same size as the wells in the muffin tin. Lay a ham heart in each of the wells. If desired, finely dice remnants and add to egg mixture. Pour egg mixture into muffin tin, filling only about halfway full.

Bake about 15 minutes, or until set in the middle.

Makes 6 mini quiches.

Now I had intended to flip them over when they came out of the oven and serve them upside down. I thought it would look neat with the pink ham heart on top. However, some of the egg seeped underneath the ham, so it wasn’t as pretty as I thought it would be.

Pink ham hearts.

Going into the oven. These ended up being overfilled. They really poof up when they bake and as a result, some of the egg ran out onto the top of the tin. I made too much filling. I started out with six eggs, and it made six of these overfilled ones and two halfway filled ones. So I think next time I will only do four eggs.

Happy Valentine’s Day!