This is a not-particularly-great looking recreation of a great dish that I taught at my weekly cooking class last Monday.  In the class, we made a Swiss chard, onion and cheese crustless quiche and it was delicious.  I didn't bring my camera to the class, but I wanted to post the recipe because it's so easy to make and so easy to modify with additional ingredients and flavors.  So last night I made a dish similar to the one we made Monday . . . in order to photograph it . . . but I didn't have any chard or other cooking greens.  The dish looked a lot better on Monday with some additional color.  At any rate, yeah, this is a great foundational recipe.

I should mention at this point that a "crustless" quiche is, perhaps, an oxymoron.  A quiche is a pie and pies have crusts.  Julia Child, in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has a section on quiche and the moves on to gratins, which she describes as a quiche without a crust . . . but then goes on to provide a bunch of gratin recipes with a much lower ratio of eggs to other ingredients . . . suggesting that gratins aren't simply the same quiche recipes minus the crust but, instead, substantially different concoctions.  Muddling the matter even further is the fact that in this recipe I made a pseudo crust out of breadcrumbs, so the food could more easily be removed from the pie plate after baking . . . which worked really, really well, I should say.  At the end of the day, I don't really know what to call this . . . and I think labels are less important than the foods behind them.  So I'll call this a crustless quiche, knowing full well that someone with nothing better to do might protest such a label.

Back to the adaptability of this recipe.  The foundation of this recipe consists of the eggs, milk and cream.  I encourage you to make it as described here, if you feel like it . . . or throw some Swiss chard or other cooking greens in with the onions and add that to the recipe . . . or sauté the onions with some bacon . . . or add some ham . . . throw in some mushrooms . . . add your favorite spices . . . whatever floats your boat.  Consider this a master recipe.  If you know how to make a quiche out of 4 eggs, a cup of milk and a cup of heavy cream, then you can throw in whatever else you're in the mood for . . . or whatever else is in your fridge that needs to be eaten.

• ½ medium onion, finely chopped
• 4 eggs*
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1.5 cups cheese, grated (we used Keswick Creamery's Vermeer cheese*)
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg, grated
• Salt & pepper
• 1-2 tablespoons butter
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Sauté onions until soft, about 5 minutes.  (Also sauté any other ingredients you'd like to add that would benefit from a sauté before baking.) 
3. Beat eggs lightly.  Add milk, cream, cheese, nutmeg and season with salt and pepper.  Fold in onion (and whatever else you're adding).
4. Butter the inside surface of a deep dish 9” pie plate and then coat with breadcrumbs.
5. Pour the egg mixture into the pie plate, then bake for 30-40 minutes, until no liquid seeps from the quiche when you poke it with a fork.  The eggs will puff the dish up while it's baking, so if you're entertaining and want to impress the people you're feeding, carry the quiche directly from the oven to the table before it deflates!