I wanted to make a salad with our breakfast so I just decided to make our breakfast a salad. I looked for ideas on the interwebs and found one with cinnamon toast croutons, sold.

Cut up some bread and toss with some melted butter, sugar and cinnamon and bake at 350 degrees until crunchy. Make a simple vinaigrette using 1 T. apple cider vinegar, 1 T. real maple syrup and a few T. olive oil and you’re pretty much set. Add some crispy bacon, walnuts and whatever you like and top it off with a soft boiled egg.

This was my first attempt at soft boiled eggs and they were awesome. Bring water to a boil, carefully add eggs and boil for about 5 to 7 minutes. Remove and cool or eat right away. I’m addicted.

I love basic recipes/formulas that have a million possibilities and this no crust quiche is one of them. The no crust part makes it a low calorie yet high protein breakfast (whole pie: 830 cal. 55 g. protein). Since there are three of us I divided it into six portions so we could have it again for breakfast tomorrow. Cutting it into sixths, each serving is almost 10 whopping grams protein and only about 140 calories. Come on man, that’s just awesome! J and Z both loved how these turned out, J actually said it was cooked perfectly. We easily could have eaten the whole thing, and still would have been under 300 calories with 20 grams of protein each, sorry but I love doing the math on this one because it always comes out a win.

It’s a no crust quiche but a nice baked crusty edge does present itself.

What I love about this recipe is that you can basically sub out any veggies/cheeses/meats/milks you want so the combinations are endless. Ours was sort of a Mediterranean style with the feta and all though some black olives, fresh basil and tomatoes would have been nice too. You could go a little more Mexico with it and use chorizo, pepper jack and black/pinto beans. Again, endless. This is now and forever on our morning menu.

I’m seriously surprised we didn’t just finish the whole thing right then.

A couple of quick stories. First the Pa Boy, it’s named after a sandwich Pa made when he was in town a couple months ago (no shrimp, just kinda clever). When we went to Trader Joe’s he was “allowed” to pick out some items of his own. The things he grabbed were deli meat and these awesome little artisan rolls (and an apple pie). When we got back home Pa made up some sandwiches, Z ate ‘em up like crazy. We’ve been getting these rolls for sandwiches “like when Pa was here” ever since. A simple sandwich consisting of sliced deli meat, tomatoes and mayonnaise, add whatever you like but keeping it simple is best here. We mmmm with every bite of these. Thank you for dropping these little babies in da basket Pa.

Story two is my battle with homemade mayonnaise. This is my third attempt, the first two being a complete disaster. First I tried an Alton Brown recipe from foodnetwork.com. It said to let it sit out for a couple hours to finish. I did that and two hours later it was still an oily mess (my technique I’m sure). When my friend Chris was in town a couple weeks ago I got little closer to mayonnaise but this time it came out tasting like salty oil. It was so thick and yellow it made J want to hurl just looking at it. I tried to make a deviled egg with it thinking it would cover up the wrongness of the whole thing but the stuff was soooooo thick it was srsly gross. This third attempt I was looking through a cook book when and I came across a new recipe. It was taunting me saying, come on, third times a charm, you can do this man. On that first attempt making mayo it was with a hand whisk. The second time a hand mixer. This last glorious time was with a blender. It was very simple and the results were amazing with instant gratification. I slapped some of it on the rolls right away and made a Pa boy sandwich. Remember this kids, NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP!!! I mean look at it, doesn’t that look pretty damn scrumptious for mayonnaise? I think so.

Waffle and egg II. Homemade whole wheat waffles and eggs using with the Waring Pro waffle iron I got for Christmas from J. Breaking open the perfectly cooked egg and sopping up the yolk and egg with bites of waffle and syrup little Z was taking huge bites and saying mmmm mmmm good every time. Yum and done, try it!

What can I say, this house loves Greek food. Every year we hit the Greek food festival devouring some of our favorite foods, spanakopita, tiropita, and baklava. I bought some phyllo dough the other day and was itching to use it and there could be no better way than some of our favorites. So I went to foodgawker as usual and found this recipe at closetcooking.com which sounded perfect. As I was reading the recipe I saw Kevin also had a recipe for baklava so I was like what the hell. Reading the two recipes I found that the baklava would need to sit for a few hours after it was made so I made it first and moved on to the spinach pie. WOW! This pie was amazing! I didn’t think it would come out this good but it did. Kid tested and mother approved. You can’t beat that.

This recipe is fast and simple, although I had no brush for brushing the oil on each layer of the phyllo so I ended up using a towel. It was a pain and took a lot more time than a brush would have (it’s been added to my long list of things to buy for the kitchen). I also only had half the spinach so I just used what I had and added a bit more feta. J doesn’t like her spanakopita to spinach-y anyway so I knew it would work out perfectly. I contemplated using half the eggs but I ended up going with all three. Next time I would go with just two eggs as it did seem a little egg-y and still keep the spinach at 1 lb. instead of the original 2 lb.. My recipe is revised below but the link above will give you the original recipe if you want it with more spinach sailor. I personally like it the way I made it. A thinner pie (which is more like we get at the Greek festival) with more feta any phyllo (which is the best part anyway). I also switched up to a 8×13 baking dish in place of the 8×8 which made for the thinner pie as well. This is one of my favorite recipes I’ve made so far in this cooking journey. Don’t forget the recipe for tzatziki sauce also posted below.