Donna Hay-esque Dairy Spinach Kugel (and My Mom’s Dairy Spinach Kugel)

This is actually a mash-up of two different Donna Hay recipes: Spinach Pie from The Instant Cook, and Spinach and Ricotta Baked Pasta from Off the Shelf. It is sort-of like spanakopita, without the phyllo, or a crustless quiche. With some salad on the side, it makes a nice light lunch.

The results reminded me very much of my mother’s dairy spinach kugel, which is a good thing. My mother’s recipe (which I am also including) uses farmer’s cheese and sauteed onions and mushrooms.

This recipe is a little easier because you skip the sauteed onions (but adding them could only make this even better). Putting the halved grape tomatoes on top is not only pretty, but adds a lot to the flavor as the acidity of the tomatoes cut through the creaminess of the dish. Serve this with a salad on the side. If you don’t want to add the tomatoes to the top of the dish, trying serving it with a tomato salad on the side.

Crustless Mini Broccoli Quiches

My husband likes quiche, but he has an aversion to extremely moist, custardy quiches. He likes quiche firm and eggy, almost like a frittata. So, I knew I hit the jackpot when I spotted a egg-heavy and liquid-light vegetable quiche recipe in an advertisement for a Wallace and Gromit movie.

This is an easy, delicious quiche. Made crustless, it could probably be modified for Passover by using potato starch instead of flour. Since there is so little liquid, the recipe would probably work even if you just left the flour out and didn’t bother to swap in a substitute at all.

I had about 12 ounces of Bodek frozen broccoli to use up, and my husband requested mini-quiches, so I modified the original recipe a bit so that it would make six crustless quiche muffins.

Ottolenghi Cauliflower “Cake”

I saw this on Smitten Kitchen (originally published in The Guardian).

Changes that I made: left out the cheese and rosemary; used regular sesame seeds, baked in a 9″ round silicone pan (lined both bottom AND sides with parchment); baked it a bit longer than the recipe said; and used 3 extra large plus 4 large eggs instead of 10 medium eggs or 8 large eggs. Oh, I forget to measure the amount of oil before adding it to the onion to saute them. I think I added maybe a couple of Tablespoons of oil to the onions and then I added another 4 Tablespoons of oil to the batter.

Roasted Red Pepper and Black Olive Quiche in a Loaf

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I have been long obsessed with French savory “cakes.” Recipes for them pop up in the most unexpected places. I was looking up cake recipes for the Jewish High Holidays in Marcy Goldman’s A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking and spotted this recipe.

Shavuoth Menu

Here is what I made for Shavuoth:

For an appetizer, homemade cheese blintzes with strawberry compote and sour cream

The rest of the meal consisted of oven poached salmon, asparagus with lemon dressing (Judy Zeidler, The Gourmet Jewish Cook), quinoa with mint and tomato, cucumber salad, leaf salad (Salad with a Crunch), and penne with smoked mozzarella and basil for one meal and macaroni and cheese for another meal.

Dessert was cheesecake, of course.

Oh, and for another meal, I served lentil soup and a quiche made from farmers cheese, jack cheese, and sauteed mushrooms and shallots. The lentil soup was from Judy Zeidler’s book, and the quiche was also (but I swapped out the scallions called for in the original recipe with the mushrooms and shallots because that is what I had in the fridge).