Cream Greens Pie with Baked Eggs

The Creamy Greens Pie with Baked Eggs was one of those recipes I expected to make and then not find it to be appeasing; fortunately, I was proven wrong.

This is a very involved recipe due to all the ingredients that need to be prepped. Before I started anything, I tore up the kale leaves and swiss chard, chopped the shallots and started thawing the frozen spinach. Oh, and I made the Flaky All-Butter Pie Dough the day before, which is a really great, easy recipe.

Once I actually started the process, I rolled the pie dough on my floured counter to fit my 9-inch skillet. I pressed it into the sides, cut off the excess and pricked the bottom with a fork. I bought pie weights for baking pies, but my gut told me there wasn’t nearly enough to keep the form with the foil that I placed into the pie dough. I added some dried rice and baked it for about 23 minutes. While it was a lot of rice to take out afterwards, the pie crust kept its shape!

I moved on to the veggies, cooking the kale for two minutes to get it nice and bright. I transferred it to cool water and then squeezed the extra water out of it. I then repeated all of this with the swiss chard. After that, I finely chopped both the kale and swiss chard together. For baking, this was a lot of work!

In another pan, I cooked the shallots with butter. I then added some flour so the shallots were coated. I added the kale and swiss chard, as well as the spinach with salt and pepper. This all cooked down pretty quickly; it’s amazing how you start with these massive bunches of greens and then it whittles down to practically nothing!

While the greens cooled down, I stirred together an egg with heavy cream, parmesan, dill and nutmeg. I added the greens and made sure it was all evenly mixed together. That filling then went into the baked pie crust.

The next part was a bit nerve wracking, especially since my skillet was smaller than what Claire recommended using. I did manage to get six eggs over the filling, but I probably should have only used five to give more room for the eggs to sit. With a little more salt and pepper on top, this bad boy cooked for much longer than I anticipated; about 35 minutes. This was because the center egg took longer to cook than the others, which was also nerve racking! I didn’t want the side eggs to overcook, but there wasn’t much more I could do in that moment.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I anticipated this dish tasting weird; it was absolutely delicious! If you like quiche, you’ll like this dish, as it is along the same lines. The greens compliment the parmesan mixture and eggs very well, and the pie crust tops it off perfectly. The hubby also found it very enjoyable, even going back for seconds! If you plan to make this for breakfast, hopefully you can do some of it ahead of time to make the process easier when everyone wakes up and wants food. While it would take a lot to convince me to do this one again due to the work, it definitely pays off in the end.

Claire calls this one the “Citizen Kane” of Dessert Person in her YouTube video, very accurate if you ask me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svgBpVZKel4