Tofu-Veggie Pie

So, we actually made this awhile ago, and I never posted it because it took me a while to upload the pictures.  This is another experiment, not quite as oddball as the melon pasta or ice cream, but certainly a little out of box for us.  Quiche is pretty awesome, and a standby in our house.  You can toss in just about any vegetable, and it's delicious, and leftovers are always welcome.  Anyway, a quiche isn't necessarily the most healthy thing to have on standby, especially with all the butter in the crust and the eggs and cream and stuff in the filling (though I usually just use skim milk, but whatever, you get the point).  So, in an effort to make things a little more healthy, we've experimented with crustless quiches (very good!), and this experiment was with eggless quiche.

These veggies don't know what's in store for them!

I know what you're thinking.  Eggless quiche??  It's hardly the same thing!  Which is true.  And while (spoiler alert) the experiment was successful and the quiche came out well, Matt and I both decided it's not really quiche.  If you go into this thinking it is, you'll probably be disappointed.  If you go into this thinking it's a tofu-veggie pie, it's delicious.  So it's all in your mind, man!

I found this recipe online, and made a few adaptations.  It also calls for a crust, which I scrapped.  In the future, I think I'll try it with a crust-alternative.  I've seen recipes that call for sliced, roasted potatoes to be used as the crust, or for polenta or leftover rice, and I think all of those would work well here.  And would add a little more substance to this pie, because as it is, it's not quite a meal on its own.  But that's for another post, I guess.

Tofu blended with milk and seasoning.  You don't even know it's tofu, right?

The recipe I had calls for firm tofu that is pureed in a blender with soy milk.  Since we don't have a blender (and don't really need one) I bought silken tofu instead, figuring that this would make it easier to puree and mix with the remaining ingredients.  We also don't have any soy milk, so I used regular milk instead.  I'm not particularly fond of soy milk, so I didn't want to buy a whole container of it when I only needed half of a cup.  I also switched up some of the seasoning from the recipe, and added in a lot more vegetables, but I think that's to be expected.  Otherwise, I followed the recipe.

The problem with tofu is it's hard to know when it's done.  But this is done.

We polished off quite a bit of it, and decided that once you realize you're not eating a quiche, it's actually pretty delicious!  And it's also really healthy - soy has tons of nutrients and protein and stuff, and the rest of the quiche was just a bunch of veggies, so you really can't go wrong!  We decided that next time it would be good with some kind of crust, though, to give it a little more substance.  I have a recipe for a rice crust using leftover cooked rice, and I think this might be a good place to use it.  You could use a standard quiche crust, but I think that kind of misses the point of trying to be all healthy and stuff.  Oh well, can't win 'em all, I guess.

Yum!