Crustless Quiche Mini-Loaves

This recipe is flourless, thus, gluten-free. The filling ingredients are—besides evaporated milk and eggs—coarse-cut ham pieces, cut-up sliced Swiss cheese, and thawed and drained, previously frozen zucchini. Because has so much sodium, I decided Swiss cheese would contribute less additional sodium than cheddar or other saltier cheese.

I had spotted an intriguing recipe for crustless mini-quiche that used cupcake cups. I started poking around for additional crustless quiches, which I list some links at the bottom of this article.

My inclination to modify kicked in. Why not make the quiche totally gluten-free? With my crusted quiches, I was always adding one or two tablespoons of flour. How about, instead of using cupcake pans, I finally use my mini-loaf pan that I've had for years and not yet used? The one ingredient that nudged me to make the recipe items all come together? Zucchini! More zucchini from the co-worker who had already given me lots of!

My pixstrip shows eight image areas:

1. Implements
2. separate bowls of zucchini, cheese, ham
3. zucchini, cheese, ham combined in a larger glass bowl
4. eggs, evaporated milk, spray oil
5. mini-loaf pan, prepped with the spray oil
6. Combo pic:
   1. mini-loaf pan with the filling mixture parceled out into the pan wells
   2. evaporated milk and eggs whisked together in the measuring cup pitcher
   3. closer-in pic of pitcher showing the total amount of fluid
7. baked mini-loaf quiches
8. baked mini-loaf quiches, one dished onto a plate (yum!)

Implements

• mini-loaf pan
• wide-mouth mixing bowl
• measuring cup pitcher or similar
• wire whisk
• measuring cups
• measuring spoons

Ingredients

• Solid fillings, listed in the order that the 2nd pic shows
• thin-sliced zucchini, previously frozen, then thawed and drained to weigh 10 oz. (YMMV if you use fresh zucchini.)
• 8 oz shredded Swiss cheese (I used thin-sliced Swiss cheese that I cut into smaller pieces.)
• 8 oz cubed ham or similar (I cut ham pieces into small-cube size.)
• Wet
• 4 eggs
• 12 oz evaporated milk

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350°.
2. Spray oil into the pan wells. You can do this step any time before you add the solid fillings or fluids into the pan.
3. Prepare the bowls of zucchini, Swiss cheese, and ham. Stir together in a bigger bowl.
4. Divvy up the fillings into the mini-loaf pan wells.
5. Beat eggs and evaporated milk together in a separate bowl. (I used a large, plastic measuring cup.) If desired, beat the eggs first, then blend in the milk.
6. Pour the egg-and-milk mixture into the pan wells, being careful not to overfill.
7. Bake for about 40 to 45 minutes. Test for doneness with a toothpick.
8. Use a cooky spatula or similar to press a mini-quiche's sides away from pan walls, then lift it onto a plate.
9. Repeat extraction for each quiche. You can store the rest of them by wrapping each individually in food wrap and freezing them.

Post-Recipe Thoughts
When I tried extracting a mini-loaf quiche (gingerly using a cooky spatula and plastic knife), I noticed some fluid at the bottom of the pan well. It's a good thing I had drained the zucchini before I mixed and baked.

Each wrapped mini-quiche weighed about 4 ounces. Hmmm, snack size!

On occasion, I've thawed one a few hours or overnight in the fridge, then microwave it for about a minute, using a nearly ancient, low-power, 700-watt oven). I'd still get fluid, which I concluded came from the ham. (I've reheated ham slices from the same ham and wound up with fluid.)

One friend, more patient than I, reheated one mini-loaf quiche that I gave her. She placed hers inside a dish and lid set, and heated it in a regular oven. Hers came out fine, without extra fluid.

What did I do with the fluid? Sipped it like it was a broth. Tasty!

My recipe is versatile enough for using different ingredients, different baking shapes. You could even try pouring the ingredients into a pie shell for a regular quiche. For that matter, try the cupcake-sized wells as several recipes say to use.

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The following webpages attracted my attention while I searched for ideas for crustless, mini, and quiche:

Crustless Veggie Mini Quiches
This recipe uses Egg Beaters pourable eggs. Yields cupcake-sized quiches. Some good advice about ingredients:

Use your favorite vegetables in these mini quiches. Firm vegetables such as carrots, broccoli or asparagus will need to be cooked in the microwave a few minutes and then chopped finely so they will be tender at the end of the baking time.

Mini Loaf Pan Quiche Lorraine
This recipe calls for loads of ingredients, including flour. (This recipe makes crusted mini-loaves in individual pans.)

Crustless Quiche Lorraine
In contrast to the previous recipe I listed, this one makes a full-size quiche that calls for a pound of bacon, a whole onion, and six eggs. The author does mention using a 12" ceramic quiche pan. She suggests cutting the ingredients by about a third if using a pie pan.

Crustless Quiche for One
This crustless mini-quiche is flour-free and free of cow dairy products, using soy milk and soy creamer. Even though using vegan and soy cheese, the author suggests alternatives of mozzarella or cheddar.

Mini Crustless Quiches
The recipe looks heavy on the eggs (5) and light on the milk (1/4 cup). The yield is six muffin-size mini-quiches, but I can't tell the muffin well size. The author makes a statement about about types of veggies to use (similar to another sentiment):

you can add whatever veggies you like {or tolerate} or happen to have on hand in your home

Mini Quiche Recipe
This recipe is light on both the eggs (1) and milk (1/2 cup). She uses a mini-muffin pan for 15 crusted quiches.

Update, as of 9/10/2014

• Original zucchini amount: 2 cups prviously frozen zucchini, thawed to measure 2 cups
• Original baking time: about 30 minutes, then test for doneness

Zucchini Overflow?

Good harvest of zucchini lately? Gotten a bunch from people who have been harvesting them? An explanation for the overflow might be from wiseGEEK's "What is zucchini?" site. "Many markets carry this squash in the summer, and it is also a snap to grow at home, although some caution is advised, as the plants can produce way more fruit than one would think is physically possible."

A few times this month, a co-worker brought some gargantuan ones, and I've gleefully partaken of them, and passed on buying any in the store for awhile. I've grated or sliced these homegrown ones for recipes, or bagging and freezing after shredding and slicing, As of a week ago, I've baked two half batches of zucchini mini-muffins, varied by well shapes, and one batch of crustless ham-swiss-zucchini quiche.

For the next few articles, I'll publish three recipes for zucchini mini-muffins and one for the quiche.
The two half-batches of mini-muffins I baked last week had the same ingredients and baking time. The pans differed—aluminum round vs. silicone square—because I wanted to test my theory that one type of pan would yield moister results than the other pan.

My third batch of mini-muffins will again use the same ingredients, but the amount will be a 3/4-recipe batch, using both types of pans. I'll be using zucchini that I grated, froze, bagged, then let thaw. I'll not squeeze, as thawed zucchini is watery when squeezed.

I consider mini-muffin sizes to be a bit more appealing than regular cupcake size—more units that are available for distributing in a social environment. The amount of batter for making one cupcake-sized goodie is the same amount as for three mini-muffins. (At a potluck event, people can more easily pick up a small, self-contained morsel than commit to a larger item or something that requires slicing, particularly a pie.)

The Betty Crocker recipe has lots of details, including baking times for various pans. The Paula Deen recipe includes nutmeg, a spice I'd like to use in more recipes than I do. The most appealing reason I like these two 2-loaf recipes, besides relative ease of the process, is the even number of eggs. Making half-recipes is a lot easier when dividing four eggs than three eggs.

Some additional zucchini links:

• Zucchini History
• Vegetable Dictionary - Zucchini
• Zucchini nutrition facts
• My veggie pasta recipe, which calls for zucchini as one of the four veggies. (Other veggies are celery, carrots, and yellow squash--all 1/2-pounds each, and Salad-Shooter sliced.)

Pixstrips in Blog Articles

My convenient-recipe blog articles show series of progressive pictures at the top, from start to finish of each recipe. Each recipe pixstrip (the assembled image) contains eight images except for one that has nine. Clicking a pixstrip opens a new window with an enlargement. Nice of Blogspot to have that easy-access feature.

This article describes the process—staging the shots, processing the individual pictures, assembling them into a pixstrip, and uploading it into the article. The settings I use (outlined with red rectangles) appear in the image above. (I omitted the in-progress and completed images, as those stages should be obvious.)

The first time I made the decision to include pictures was for the spinach-cheese taco recipe. During preparation, I took pictures as follows:

1. plate
2. tortilla added
3. cheese added
4. spinach added
5. contents microwaved
6. more cheese added
7. contents microwaved
8. taco folded, with fork above it

My other convenient recipes I put pixstrips in are "A Convenient Cake Mix Cooky Batch" and "A Convenient Cake Mix Cooky Batch--Easter". The first cooky recipe is for Valentine Day cookies, which results in red cookies. The second one is for Easter-theme cookies. Both recipes use the basic ingredients of a box of cake mix, one-third cup of oil, and two eggs. I recently retrofitted "A Convenient Quiche" with a pixstrip. I took about a dozen pictures, winnowed the collection down to nine shots, then created the strip.

Principles for Pictures

• Take more pictures than you'll need—preferably in the order of the actions. If you think you might use any shots, take them. Better to have the pictures and not need any than need any and not have them.
• Find a decent-sized staging area that has minimal clutter or visual distractions. Most of my areas have been a countertop where I don't need to move many items more than once or twice. (I'm not a professional photographer; just using gut feelings.)

Gathering the Recipe Items

1. Gather all the ingredients.
2. Gather as many utensils as you can remember. Basic ones are bowls, spoons, spatulas, pans, and utensils to blend with. Secondary ones are cooling rack(s), oven mitts, egg timer as necessary. (I use the term "utensils" very loosely.)

Taking Pictures During the Recipe Process

1. Stage ingredients and utensils for big-picture effect if it makes sense. Take a few pictures from different angles if unsure of how the items look together.
2. Take pictures in the logical order of action. If possible, take the pictures from the same angle and distance. (Note: I stand on a stepladder about a foot away and shoot my pictures using my camera's highest resolution and quality.)

Storing and Processing the Pictures—Camera Off-loaded Set, Processing/Processed Set

1. Offload the pictures into a folder; keep these originals in one place.
2. Copy the original pictures into a different folder for modifying them. Typical modifications will include cropping and lightening as necessary, then saving them. (I save as .png to avoid losing picture quality.) Occasionally, cropped enlargements help.

I create a folder called "images". I create two subfolders—one I call "fromcam" for the pictures I off-load from my camera, the other I call "inprocess&finished".

Generating the Final Image (the Pixstrip)

1. Resize and save each image to save filesize space. I resize to about 15%, or about 150 x 150 pixels.
2. Enlarge the first image's canvass wide enough to accommodate the other images in order.
3. Copy/paste the images as desired, then save the pixstrip, using a reasonable name.

Note: An alternative is to resize and save each image first (skipping the first step), follow the second and third steps, resize the entire strip, and save the reduced pixstrip under a different name.

Uploading the Pixstrip

1. After logging into the blog account, select or create a blog article.
2. Use the blog image-upload command to upload the pixstrip.
3. View the image at the top of this article for the settings I use in Blogspot. YMMV for your own blog site.

A Convenient Quiche

(Quiche pixstrip retrofitted into article May 18, 2010)

Yesterday, I baked a quiche that requires only 5 ingredients:

• 1 ready-to-bake pie shell with pan
• 2 cups of milk
• 1 packet of dry vegetable soup mix (0.9 oz)
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup of shredded cheese (jack, cheddar, swiss, or combination)

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°.
2. Stir the dry soup mix and milk in a 4-cup bowl and let the mixture soak for at least 10 minutes.
3. Use a fork to mix the eggs in a separate bowl.
4. Stir the eggs into the soup/milk mixture.
5. Layer 3/4 of the cheese into the pie shell, followed by the eggs/soup/milk, then the rest of the cheese on top. (Note: For my next effort, I'm thinking of doubling the cheese.)
6. Bake for at least an hour; about half-way time, place foil or aluminum pie shield at pie edge to prevent edge overbrowning. (The original recipe states 45 minutes, which I found to be too short.)
7. Test for doneness using a toothpick. If pulled toothpick shows mixture wetness, bake longer.
8. Let the quiche stand at least 10 minutes before cutting it.

This recipe is from "Spring Vegetable Quiche" in The New Woman's Day Cookbook: Simple and Healthy Recipes for Every Occasion, copyright 2006, ISBN 1-933231-01-7 (online version of recipe at http://www.womansday.com/Recipes/Spring-Vegetable-Quiche).

Similar dish, which uses Knorr soup mix and adds spinach—
http://www.letsmakeknorr.com/Recipes/Print.aspx?RecipeId=6229&Version=2