Leftover Queen

I hate to toot my own horn, but it’s true. I’m good at cooking a planned special meal, great at looking at what’s in the pantry and designing a meal, but my true genius is re-purposing leftovers. A good skill to have for thrifty eco-wifeys like us.

Consider this.

The other night I looked in the fridge to see what I should make for dinner. Here’s what I found:

one cooked sweet potato

one cooked weird little decorative squash (left over from post thanksgiving scrounging)

leftovers from the night before– baked potato with cauliflower and broc saute

half a package of thawed, frozen spinach

feta cheese that really needed to get used

scrap pie crust

I didn’t think to take a photo, so it’s understandable if you don’t believe me, but what I turned out from those ingredients could easily grace the menu of a fancy vegetarian restaurant, and is going straight onto my favorite quickie meals list. It’s part quiche, part gratin, part pot pie. And all yummeronies! It would work with just about any kind of leftovers. Granted, how often do you have leftover pie crust? But I think it would have been almost as fantastic with a breadcrumb and cheese top “crust.”

Layer your kitchen sink ingredients in a greased baking dish. Make sure there’s some kind of cheese in there. Whisk up 3 eggs with one cup of milk and a tablespoon of flour. Salt and pepper too, and any other spice that strikes yer fancy. (I used a small sized Pyrex,  I think it’s 5×7, it fits in our toaster oven. I’ve got two and use them constantly. They also have a rubber fitted lid, so when I’m not using them to bake in, I use them for non-plastic tupperware. Anyway, if you use a bigger pan, you’ll want to increase you’re egg/milk mixture.) Then pour over the top, shaking the dish a little to settle the liquid down into all the cracks and crannies. Of course, many ways would work, but I had the liquid just below the level of the ingredients. If you put in lots of liquid it would go more towards a quiche and less like a veggie pie. I wanted just enough egg to bind it all into one cohesive leftover ambrosia, not enough so’s it tasted like egg. Then I just set the crust on top and cut to fit. If you don’t have a pie crust, top with a layer of cheese, then a thick layer of breadcrumbs, with a little more cheese sprinkled on top.

Here’s the only drawback. It only takes 5 or 10 minutes to put together, but then 40-60 minutes to bake. So, it’s not exactly in the quickest class. I nuked my layered ingredients, pre-egg mixture (that’s the other great thing about these small Pyrexes, they fit in the micro too!) to get a little jump on the baking time.

That’s it! Prepare to be delishified!