Kale quiche-in-a-pan--an experiment gone terribly wrong, then marvelously rightMost of the time, I plan what I want to cook ahead of time: I know exactly what I want to make and I'll get the appropriate ingredients. Once in a while, I'll decide to prepare something with what I have on hand, which is always a bit of a risk as I am not one of those cooks that can spontaneously pair ingredients together and make a successful dish.
It was a Sunday night, I had spent the weekend doing my usual: lots of chores, some errands, shopping, meeting friends, cooking... when I realized I had not prepared anything for breakfast for the week. This was problematic.
I am one of those people who must eat breakfast--I love breakfast, especially a hot breakfast, one that involves eggs, toast and coffee, or steel-cut oatmeal with brown sugar and granola, or pancakes with real maple syrup. In the ideal world, I would wake up when my alarm goes off, get ready for work and leisurely make breakfast for myself... but in my world, I wake up well after my alarm has gone off, and way too late to eat, much less make, breakfast.
I've come up with a solution, and that is to make breakfast ahead of time and take it to work, like I do with lunch (so yes, that's right, I not only bring lunch to work, I bring breakfast to work. As well as an afternoon snack, like an apple or peanut butter sandwich. I'm a hungry girl.) This actually works pretty well with steel-cut oatmeal and with a frittata-esque quiche because I can heat them up easily in the office microwave.
I've made frittata and quiche before and I knew it involved eggs, cream, some veggies and cheese, and then some oven time. One night, I was making a broccoli quiche-in-a-pan for breakfast the next day, I'd already cracked the eggs and chopped up onions and broccoli when I realized I had no liquid like cream or half-and-half to add. I was already in my pj's so there was no way I was going outside, so I thought, how bad could it be without cream? I threw everything into the pan, stuck it in the oven and it came out great! Cream or milk definitely adds a little more fluff and lightens up the egg, but I'm okay with sacrificing that in order to eliminate a) the need to buy cream, and b) the calories.
So back to Sunday night: knowing that I could get away with making my quiche without the cream, and not having breakfast for the week planned, I decided to make a quiche with kale, onions, parsley and gruyere (the fresh ingredients I happened to have on hand). I started with:
- chopping about half a red onion and sauteeing it in olive oil
- cracked five eggs into a bowl, sprinkled with a little salt and pepper
- tore up some kale and added to the bowl
Not wanting to start over or admit defeat, I proceeded anyways. I added two more eggs and about a tablespoon of water. I added the parsley and two slices of gruyere that I had julienned. [Have I mentioned I am not a professional cook? Yes, I often buy pre-sliced gruyere, in lieu of sliced yellow American cheese, so that I can have grilled cheese sandwiches, or egg and cheese on toast, or chop up to add to a frittata. It's versatile for someone like me who really only has herself to feed. Anyways, I digress.]
I added this mixture to the sauteed onions and stuck the pan in the oven, skeptical about the results. I don't have any photos of this because I thought for sure it would be a disaster, but it basically looked like a pan of kale, with a little egg clinging to the leaves. Sigh.
By the way, I used my small fry pan, I think it's 8", because when I've made this frittata in the past, I used a 10" skillet and used about 10 eggs (although the recipe calls for 12), so I figured if I used less eggs, I could use a smaller pan. Plus, I can cut it up into quarters for four days' worth of breakfasts, and it will still equal less than two eggs per serving (yes, this is how my mind works).
I had planned on leaving it in for about 20 minutes. Since I was so nervous about the results, I checked on it about 10 minutes in and what do you know, the egg is actually puffing up around the kale! But the kale is starting to get brown and crispy so I covered it with aluminum foil, thinking it would bake/steam the kale and finish off the egg. Ten minutes later it was beautifully puffy; a few more minutes without the foil allowed the top to brown a little. And then I had this:
Not bad, not bad at all. And it tasted great, even on the next day after being nuked in the microwave. And I totally gave myself a high-five afterwards for averting a culinary disaster.
