Tag Archives: breakfast

Crust-less Quiche

I was searching for some quick breakfast recipes and stumbled across Mark’s Daily Apple. I’ve been to his site before, but only by stumbling over it in the past. Now I’ll be visiting on purpose in the future. He’s on the primal diet, which isn’t quite where I’m at yet, but with most recipes being something I can eat (gluten-free, dairy-free), I’m a fan.

His recipe for Sausage & Egg Breakfast Bites sounded good and like a no brainer. I know it’s hard to believe that making a smoothie is too time consuming some mornings, but I needed to find something I could just grab. Now I know I could hard cook some eggs, but I don’t normally pre-peel them and don’t find peeling them on my way to work (or even at work) to be all that ideal. Plus, I subscribe to the idea of getting at least 20 grams of protein per meal, and to do that with hard-cooked eggs, I’d have to eat three, which is a lot of peeling.

I’ve tweaked Mark’s recipe to make sure each serving has plenty of protein and to include some dairy that I can have. And as it’s pretty much like making a quiche, you can add in whatever ingredients you like. I’ve made a couple renditions thus far.

Cheryl’s Crust-less Quiche (based on Mark’s recipe)
12 eggs
1 cup goat milk
a couple pinches of sea salt
3/4-1 cup of your preferred veggies
1 pre-cooked sausage or a couple slices of cooked bacon
1/2 cup shredded cheese (I use raw cow milk Swiss)

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F.
  2. Beat together the eggs, milk and salt.
  3. Mix in your veggies, chopped into edible-sized pieces.
  4. Pour the mixture into a greased 9″x9″ baking pan (I use coconut oil to grease my pans). 
  5. Add the sausage/bacon to the mixture, distributing evenly around the pan.
  6. Sprinkle on the cheese.
  7. Bake for 20-30min, checking at 20 and 25 minutes to see if done.
  8. Cool and cut into squares.
Yield: 4 servings (6 if you aren’t really interested in as much protein at each meal)

 At the forefront is my first crust-less quiche. I had set aside some of the browned onions and bacon from making Zuppa Toscana. I added those plus raw milk Swiss cheese.

In the background is a regular old quiche that I made for my husband. I should have added more eggs, as the filling didn’t cook up as much as I thought it would. The crust was partially wheat flour, so the crust is a little more brown naturally and wasn’t really burned badly like my photo makes it seem. I’m working on making gluten-free pie crusts, but in the meantime, crust-less quiches are perfectly fine with me. This is my second crust-less quiche that I just made tonight so I haven’t tasted it yet. This one has a blend of spinach and kale in it. I also cut up a pre-cooked fire-roasted chicken sausage. I sprinkled on some raw Swiss and voilà! Hopefully I didn’t add too much kale; it’s a very green quiche.

When the quiche first comes out of the oven, it will be puffed up. As it cools, it will settle.

Smoothie Love

This morning wasn’t unlike most mornings. I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to walk downstairs. And I definitely didn’t want to make breakfast (despite spending way too much on groceries last night so that I could start my day out right with an eggy breakfast).

I amaze myself in that I don’t even want to take the time to use my VitaMix sometimes. Like it’s too hard or something. Wah! Throw things in. Flip a switch. Yep, that’s how much my body hates mornings sometimes; it doesn’t even want to operate a blender.

Instead of making breakfast, I got on my lappy and started organizing links to recipes I wanted to make. I inadvertently forgot to save one to some yummy looking peanut butter bars and knew I originally had found it through Elana Amsterdam’s website, Elana’s Pantry (which if you don’t know, she’s a gluten-free cook/baker who has celiac disease). In searching her site for PB recipes, I came across her PB protein shake recipe. Drinking essentially a PB shake for breakfast sounded wonderful. At last! My body was inspired to haul myself off the couch and back into the kitchen to operate the dastardly difficult blender.

Elana’s recipe calls for a different kind of protein powder than what I have and she uses ice when sadly we don’t have an operating ice maker in our freezer and I hate ice cube trays full of sloshy water. Instead, I used her recipe for inspiration and employed my usual smoothie formula to make a chocolate PB banana flavor. Which was fan.tas.tic! Yum! My favorite combo of flavors for a milkshake, but made in a way that doesn’t wreck my body.

Cheryl’s Dee-ricious Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie
~1 cup So Delicious Coconut Milk (I only say aprox. because I use the blender lines to measure)
1 small to medium organic banana
1 healthy serving of MaraNatha Organic Creamy Roasted PB with salt (so a little over 2 Tbsp)
1 heaping scoop of Life’s Basics Plant Protein in chocolate (*edit* I realized I put in less than a full scoop because of the protein in the PB. It’s up to you how much powder you’d like to put in.)

  1. Add ingredients into VitaMix in order given to prevent powder and PB from sticking to the bottom and blade too much.
  2. Blend until smooth.
  3. Enjoy!
  4. Clean the VitaMix right away to make it easier to get all the left over gunk out. Sorry about the oil residue from the PB! That will take a little longer to clean.
I usually make cold, icy smoothies by putting in some frozen fruit or greens in place of having no ice. I actually found this smoothie to be an acceptable temperature that was just a little cold (mostly room temp though – don’t overblend or you’ll heat it up) due to the refrigerated coconut milk. Could be a good choice for the coming chilly months. Although with ice, this would be super frothy and good too. I’ll pretend not to be jealous of all you with ice makers.