I’ve always been a fan of breakfast.
As a kid, breakfast was special because it gave me time to read the back and sides of cereal boxes. Cereal was my prefered breakfast of choice, so I’ve read hundreds of boxes at this point in my life.
Until my early 20s, I was a pretty picky eater, and I liked plain, simple foods.
I remember going to brunch every now and then (not something we did regularly!) and seeing that quiche was always one of the dishes served.
I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t like vegetables mixed into things…or touching each other. I liked them on their own, coated with spoonfuls of Kraft Parmesan cheese, thank you very much.
Now that I’m an adult, I’ve expanded my breakfast options beyond a bowl of Cheerios and am much more adventurous about how I start my day.
I now LOVE quiches, frittatas, and omelets, and as recently as the past year have come to love both overeasy and sunny-side up eggs. Our friend, Joe, has been known to call the latter “dippy eggs.”
My culinary nutrition instructor, Meghan Telpner, came out with her first cookbook (The Undiet Cookbook) earlier this month and in it is a recipe for a cool new spin on a breakfast quiche, one that uses a single, inexpensive, simple ingredient as the crust – millet.
If you’re scratching your head wondering what millet is, I’m here to help.
I’m going to bet that everyone reading this has seen it before, even if you’ve never eaten it.
It’s one of the main ingredients in…birdseed.
But, fortunately, this ancient gluten-free grain is not just “for the birds” and was cultivated in East Asia as far back as 10,000 years ago!
You can use it in recipes just as you would use couscous, quinoa, or rice, but you can also turn it into a crust, which is what Meghan did for this recipe.
If you don’t have one of the veggies called for in this quiche, swap them out for what you do have. Dishes like this are versatile and lend themselves to modification, so be creative!
If you’d like to up the flavor of the crust, I suggest adding maybe a half teaspoon of sea salt to the millet while it cooks. You can also cook the crust itself for 10-12 minutes before adding the egg mixture to it.
The next time I make it, I think I will saute a couple cloves of garlic in the pot the millet cooks in, so that flavors gets infused into the crust. I might even press some fresh thyme leaves into the crust before adding the egg and veggie mixture on top 🙂
Elaine
How long should the crust bake before adding the filling?
racheldruck
Hi Elaine! Meghan’s recipe doesn’t call for baking the crust once the millet is cooked but other recipes like this call for coating the cooked millet crust with about half a tablespoon of coconut oil and then baking for 10-12 minutes before adding the filling. Hope that helps!