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Finding balance with food, movement, and community for my (dairy-free) family.

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Thursday, May 5, 2011

Why Eat Cereal When You Can Have Crust-Free Dairy-Free Mini-Quiche?

After making green eggs, I had half a bag of baby spinach to use up, so I decided to try a suggestion from my friend Laura (whose children, incidentally, are the best veggie-eaters I've ever met) and experiment with crust-free quiche as a breakfast food in which to smuggle some vegetables.

Papa Bear saw me prepping ingredients last night and I told him what I was planning.  His response:  "You know, normal people let their kids eat cereal for breakfast."

Quiche in my well-loved over-sized muffin pan.
My kids are dairy-intolerant, so I browsed a number of quiche recipes and noticed some common proportions of ingredients and devised my own little recipe.  May I just say:  yum!  I really enjoyed these.

Kid Reviews
Baby Brother (age 1) gobbled it up.

Sis (nearly age 3)  helped me make these, which I always hope will make her more interested in eating new food, but doesn't actually seem to.  She took one bite, said she liked it, and then ate her toast and wouldn't take a second bite of the quiche.

Big Brother (age 5) ate one bite and said he did not like it.  I was actually really thrilled that he was willing to take a single bite.  I suggested he wait until it cooled off a bit and then try again--which, to my surprise, he did. He still didn't like it.  I suggested we add a little salt and pepper and try one more bite--he agreed, still didn't like it.  Although he only had three bits, his uncharacteristic cheerful cooperation in sampling multiple bites makes me think that with some adjusting this dish has a chance of succeeding with him.

Next Time . . .
I need to include meat as my kids love sausage and ham and the inclusion of either would motivate them to try it. I think I need to start with fewer veggies to ease them into the idea.  If I can get them to accept the mini-quiches, then I can gradually increase and vary the veggie content.  I think I'll try very small pieces of broccoli next time as we've had success with Big Brother eating broccoli at dinner time if it's very tender.

So here's the recipe as I made it this morning:

Dairy-Free Spinach and Tomato Crust-Free Mini-Quiche
5 ounces baby spinach
1 teaspoon of coconut oil (or other healthy fat)
3 eggs
1 cup hemp milk (or other milk substitute)
2 tablespoons whole wheat pastry flour
1 heaping tablespoon nutritional yeast flakes *
1/4 teaspoon mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt (I will increase this next time)
1/4 of a tomato, diced

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease muffin pan.

2.  Wash and dry the spinach.  I chopped mine up just to be sure there would be no large unwieldy bites for the kids to reject.

3.  Melt coconut oil in skillet and then add spinach, cooking on high heat for 1-2 minutes until spinach is wilted and bright green.

4. Divide cooked spinach and place into each muffin (hmm . . . what word goes here? "cup" perhaps?  I'm going with "cup").  I used a larger than standard size muffin pan, so only made 4 mini-quiche.  In a standard size muffin pan, this would probably yield 6 mini-quiche.

5.  Whisk together eggs, hemp milk, nutritional yeast flakes, mustard and salt.

6.  Pour egg mixture on top of the spinach in each muffin cup.

7.  Sprinkle diced tomato on top of each quiche.

8.  Bake for 30-35 minutes or until knife inserted in the center comes out clean.  Let rest 5-15 minutes before removing and serving.

*Nutritional yeast flakes are available at health food stores.  They have a cheddar-ish sort of flavor to them (at least they seem to if you are some one who hasn't actually eaten cheddar cheese in years).  We use them to make a mock-macaroni and cheese dish, so I thought they'd be a nice inclusion here since most quiche recipes call for cheese.  If you can tolerate dairy, I'd skip this and just sprinkle in cheese.

2 comments:

  1. This is great, Bethany. I will definitely try this recipe out for my little guy. It's so hard managing a milk and wheat allergic child who is whimsical with loving or hating food.

    The mock macaroni cheese wounds interesting - can you please post?

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  2. Posted the mock mac & cheese. :)

    If your LO has wheat issues you'll need to make a few additional substitutions. It does have flour in it to thicken the sauce--perhaps you could sub in a smaller amount of corn starch or arrowroot powder or another some rice flour perhaps? And of course it has noodles--perhaps rice noodles.

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