Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Not only is this a super diverse, meatless meal. It’s also super budget friendly. We just need a handful of fresh veggies, a hearty helping of cheese, some eggy custard, and a pie shell to make a delicious meal that works for breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner!

First, let’s talk quiche crust, as that’s secretly my favorite part of any pie. We’re going to make things nice and simple on ourselves by using a store bought refrigerated pie crust. Now, if you’re totally anti pre-made crusts, you can absolutely make your own favorite recipe. But, I think supermarket pie crusts work perfectly here.

We’re going to blind bake our pie crust to help it along. We don’t want to have a nice and creamy quiche sitting atop a soggy crust, so blind baking helps the crust get a head start to browning up before we load it up with all of our delicious fillings. It’s as simple as pressing the pie crust into your dish, lining it with a piece of parchment paper, and filling it 2/3 of the way full with pie weights. Now, you can buy pie weights specifically for this purpose, but I keep a jar of dried beans and rice on standby to use as my weights. You won’t be able to use these for eating afterwards; but jar them back up, and keep them on hand for your next pie. Either way, we’re going to bake the crust with the weights for about 15 minutes to make sure the bottom crust doesn’t puff up. Then, we’ll remove the weights and let the bottom get some uncovered oven time.

While the crust blind bakes, we can get started on our veggies. We’re going super simple here. We only need half of an onion, half of a red bell pepper, and a heaping cup and a half of fresh broccoli. I’m usually a big proponent of swapping in frozen veggies as a time saver, but that’s not going to work for us here. To no fault of their own, frozen veggies are naturally going to be a little wetter with some extra water content from their time in the freezing/defrosting stages. And, wet things are not our friend in this quiche. So, stick with fresh produce for this recipe.

The veggies will go in a skillet with some olive oil to help them soften up and to help pull out some of that extra moisture from the veggies. We’re also going to give the veggies a little flavor love by seasoning them with some good ol’ salt and pepper plus some garlic powder and a little smoked paprika. For me growing up, anything broccoli cheddar flavored usually came alongside some ham. So, the smoked paprika helps to subtly add that smoky flavor without having to add any meat. It’s really a great trick!

Once our crust has finished round one of baking, we’ll spread our veggies over the bottom, top the veggies with a handful of cheddar cheese, then finish the masterpiece with a custardy mix of egg, heavy cream, and milk. Before we send the quiche to the oven to finish baking, we want to protect the exposed edges of our crust so that it doesn’t burn. To do this, we could use a pie shield or some good ol’ fashioned aluminum foil. We only want to cover the crust and not any of the filling, so silicone pie shields are nice because they’re designed specifically to wrap around the edge of your pie plate. But, though it takes a little more effort, connecting strips of tin foil to wrap around the outer edge of the quiche does work just as well.

Our quiche only needs about 30-40 minutes in the oven, then about 15 mins to relax after baking. But then, we get to dig in! That crust will be perfectly crisp and golden around the edges. The filling will be smooth and creamy. And, those veggies add nice little bursts of texture to make the filling a little more interesting. And since this quiche does GREAT served basically any time of day, you can get creative with your side accompaniments. This quiche likes taters. This quiche likes berries. This quiche likes salad. This quiche likes everything!

Ok, everyone! I’m going to try to get us back on the Meatless Monday bandwagon; so if you have any requests, let me know!

Until then…enjoy! And, let’s eat!