Week 2 - Dairy

The theme for Week 2 was dairy, which we thought would be pretty easy to complete. So many recipes would fit this challenge; the hardest part was figuring out which one to choose. I decided on this recipe for a swiss chard and goat cheese custard bake from Kalyn's Kitchen that I had bookmarked sometime last year. The ingredient list included milk and 3 types of cheese (goat cheese, parmesan, and mozzarella), so this would definitely count for the dairy challenge.

The ingredients for the custard bake, slightly adapted from the original, were:

- 10 oz bag of kaleidoscope chard leaves, finely chopped ($1.99)
- 1 yellow onion, chopped ($0.60)
- olive oil for sauteing ($0.20)
- 5 oz log of goat cheese ($2.49)
- 1/2 cup of 2% milk ($0.14)
- 8 eggs ($1.66)
- salt and pepper ($0.05)
- 1/4 cup shredded mozzarella ($0.60)
- 1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan, divided ($1)

The total cost of the custard bake was about $8.73. Not bad for dinner for 2, and there were enough pieces left over for breakfast for 2 more days. I only used the chard leaves for the custard bake, but sauteed the stems while the custard was baking, so I'll just count the whole bag as used for dinner.

The custard was pretty easy to put together. The prep steps were:

- chop chard and onion

- heat olive oil in skillet, saute onion until starting to brown, add chard, saute until wilted, cool

- in one bowl, stir goat cheese (softened) and milk together until smooth

- in a second bowl, beat the eggs until combined

- add salt and pepper to eggs (I added a lot of pepper but I love black pepper in eggs)

- add goat cheese/milk mixture to egg mixture

- add shredded mozzarella and half the parmesan to the mixture

- add chard/onion mixture to everything else

- stir well

Once everything was mixed together well, it was time to bake. We couldn't find any deep casserole dishes so we ended up using some pie pans. The mixture wasn't enough to completely fill up two pans but was too much for one, so we ended up with one full dish and one half-filled dish. Once the mixture was poured in, I added the rest of the parmesan to the top. We baked them for the same amount of time - about an hour at 350 degrees, until they were done and browned on the top - so one was a little more "well done" than the other. (I forgot to spray the pans with nonstick spray before adding the egg mixture, but nothing stuck. Not sure if it's the dish or how long we baked it, but I was glad for that.)

The custard bake was very similar to a crustless quiche or the insides of a quiche, and we like quiche. Baking this for an hour was good because the eggs were fully set and the slices of the bake came out really easily and intact. If we wanted to, we probably could have picked them up like slices of a pizza and eaten them without any utensils.

Overall, we really liked the flavor of this quiche/custard bake and we would make it again, maybe with other green vegetables, or maybe some other mix of cheeses. We found the flavors of the cheese to be very mild and none of them really stood out. While this wasn't a bad thing as the bake still tasted good, maybe we would use more cheese next time or a stronger flavored cheese.

To make that night even more of a dairy night, we broke open an expiring box of Boursin garlic and herb gournay cheese as an "appetizer" to eat with some crackers as we waited for the custard to bake. We love the flavor of that cheese, both the garlic one and the shallot version that also comes in the Costco sampler.  We had a pretty successful dairy challenge night!