Egg-stravaganza

In an effort to both trim our food budget, reduce waste, AND stay on top of the no-processed-foods thing, I have started recording my grocery purchases in this little notebook

and then I go through it and check thinks off as I use them. 

For the most part, this is working really well.  I don't list everything because there are some things that we always buy and always use up (bananas) and some things that I didn't write down because they were "staples."  And this is where I got into trouble.  As of Monday--for reasons that can only be described as temporary insanity induced by getting too close to the dairy case--we had almost 4 dozen eggs in our refrigerator.  This from the woman who pretty much hates eggs in any form.

Being a rather frugal person by nature and now a positive tightwad while we're on one income, I decided it would be a shame to waste all those eggs (and it being too early for Easter eggs), I made a fritatta for lunch, which in my version takes 2 eggs and enough vegetables to make the eggs unrecognizable, made a loaf of pumpkin cornbread

which used up 2 eggs and involves a super unhealthy butter & honey glaze on the top, then since I still had 1 cup of pumpkin puree left over (note to self:  freeze pumpkin in 1 cup bags as well as 2 cup bags next time), I also made a loaf of traditional pumpkin bread

that isn't that healthy either and also used up 2 eggs, for a running total of 6 eggs.  Aha!  Down to just over 3 dozen of those darn eggs.

Being a Type A, sometimes my competitive nature takes over for common sense, so for dinner I decided to make a crustless quiche.  Obviously, I'm not a big fan of quiche as it's basically an egg pie, but as long as there is enough other stuff in it, I can generally stand it in restaurants or at other people's houses, but it isn't something I've ever gone out of my way to have--it's usually more of an "I'm hungry and there aren't better options" sort of thing for me.  Not having made a quiche of any sort before, this might be where a more rational person would follow a recipe.  In my defense, I did look at a few, but I wanted to make it VERY vegetable heavy and with skim milk instead of cream.  The recipes I looked at had no consensus on baking temperature or time, and used confusing terms like bake until "just set" and "until puffy," so I figured a recipe was unlikely to be overly helpful anyway.  Time to dig in!

I decided to make my experiment very simple, so I sliced 2 yellow onions and caramelized them in about a tablespoon of butter, then mixed up 4 eggs with a cup and a half of skim milk.  I thought it safest to grease my pie plate, then I put the onions in it (which almost filled the pan all by themselves), grated just a bit of Parmesan cheese onto the onions (maybe a teaspoon?) then poured in the egg & milk mixture and hoped it would all fit.

It did, but only just.  I started to worry about the "puffy" part of the instructions.  They hadn't mentioned any definite spatial information, but I was going to be in trouble if the "puffy" part went very far.

One hour later:

this is what we ended up with.  Having never made quiche before, I'm not sure if this is what it's supposed to look like, but I can now safely tell you that the reason all the recipes use cream and not skim milk is that what you see here is basically a little quiche island floating on top of a little lake of water.  Good to know.  Aside from the Loch Quiche problem, it actually tasted really good--even for eggs.  I might even try making it again at some point................or start paying attention to the number of eggs I'm buying at the store.  One of the two................