This week I made a conscious effort to pick out meals that were cheaper to make. Obviously we still need to get our staple weekly items (lunch meat and Chobani for Anthony and frozen waffles and granola bars for me), but I was able to lower the total this week to $86. I'm still not sure how we can spend this much money and still fit it all in their small double basket carts, but both weeks we did! Some of the meals we are eating this week will not be blog worthy, but I needed to cut costs. So we will be having pasta with my red sauce (that I made enough of to freeze awhile back) and frozen pierogies with sautéed onions. I did find four recipes to make this week that are budget friendly.
The first one that I attempted was Broccoli and Cheese Quiche. Eggs are cheap, which is why eggs have been on my menu for the last two weeks. When I walked into the kitchen Sunday night, I should have just turned around and walked out. I wasn’t in the mood to cook at all. Cooking fatigue had finally set in. Not wanting to disappoint my fans (fans…yeah right) I decided to continue on with the cooking of the quiche. My experience with quiche is nil. I’ve had it to eat at brunch a couple of times, but that is about it. My thought was it’s very similar to the frittata I made last week so what could go wrong.
The first thing that needed to happen was prebaking the pie crust for 10 minutes. I just bought the two pack of frozen crust you can get at the grocery store in the freezer section. As for the filling, you start by sautéing onion until browned, than remove onion from pan and set aside. I’m not sure what’s going on with my onion sautéing skills, but I keep burning the onion a bit. We have a gas stove and I’m having trouble judging how high is too high. Medium on our stove seems like it might be the high setting for what these recipes want. There seems to be a fine line between too high with our stove and too low. It will take me awhile to find just the right spot on the knob. Next steam the broccoli in the pan with ½ a cup of water.
(a picture of broccoli, not my best effort, but most of these pictures did not come out)
Once that is tender, take the pan off the heat and mix the onion in. Then beat together three eggs, one cup of milk, and some salt and pepper. Put the vegetables in the pie crust and then pour the egg mixture on top of the vegetables, top with cheese. Bake for about 45 minutes and there you have your quiche.
Well maybe it would have been that easy if I would have used a deep dish pie crust, although the recipe does not specify using one. I had way too much filling for the pie crust that I was using; I couldn’t even fit all of the egg mixture. Luckily I was smart enough to put the pie on a baking sheet, because there was some spillage. I also put foil along the edges of the pie crust so that it wouldn’t burn. When I took the quiche out of the oven, the edges were soggy. That might have been from filling the crust too much, but I’m really not sure why it happened.
Final Product:
My thoughts: No thanks. I’ll stick to frittata. This recipe just made me so unhappy from the start. And then the results of soggy crust and no real flavor continued my unhappiness. Anthony thought the onion was a little off putting. Maybe I just need a better quiche recipe, but I have no urge to try cooking another quiche. Unless someone can change my mind, I think this will be the first and last quiche I will ever make.
The real point of making quiche is the first place was the cost, so let’s see how I did there (this is an estimate):
Small Onion/$0.24
Broccoli Crown/$1.69
3 Eggs/$0.36
Milk-/$0.23
Cheese/$1.15
Pie Crust/$1.35
Total: $5.02 (this total is assuming you already have oil, salt, and pepper)
I also had roasted red potatoes as a side, but I didn’t have to buy them they were left over from another recipe. But this meal is easily well under $10 to make.
Next up: Korean Chicken Thighs
As always if you want any of the recipes I used please let me know and I will be happy to send them along to you!
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