Spinach-Bacon Pie

I had all the ingredients in the freezer.

Spinach-Bacon Pie 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell 6 strips bacon, cooked crisp, then crumbled or chopped* 1 (12-oz) package frozen chopped spinach, defrosted 3 eggs 2 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt 2 tsp onion powder (more if desired) 1 tsp black pepper ½ tsp cayenne pepper (if desired) 1 cup evaporated milk 1 cup (or 4 oz) shredded cheddar cheese (or any other type of cheese that melts well) Heat oven to 400°. Put the spinach in a strainer and press out as much juice as possible. Mix the juice with the evaporated milk. Then add enough water to make 2 cups. Heat it up on the stove or in the microwave. In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, flour, and seasonings. Pour in the milk while stirring constantly. Then mix in the bacon and spinach. Pour this into the pie shell. If needed, gently spread out the spinach if it landed in a sort of pile. Sprinkle the cheese onto the iron. Then bake 20-25 minutes, or until golden on top. *Naturally, you can just cut up 6 pieces of pre-cooked bacon if you have that on hand. Adapted from 9th Grand National Cookbook: 100 Prize-Winning Recipes from the Pillsbury's Best 9th Grand National Bakeoff, 1957--- via Mid-Century Menu. Recipe by Linda Lee Bauman (Whitehouse, Ohio), Junior Winner

I love the three bell pepper slices on top of the pie (which don't get mentioned in the recipe.) I imagine people fighting over who gets to eat the garnish because there isn't enough to go around.

When no one is around the house to bemoan the absence of meat, I often make vegetarian (or at least vegetarian-ish) food. Spinach-cheese-and-mushroom pasta is one of my default choices when I want to make dinner without thinking about it. This recipe (which is scanned from a Pillsbury Bakeoff handout) came across the Mid-Century Menu group, and I figured it was about the same meal with the ingredients rearranged a bit. Also, bacon is involved. 

When we made the gumdrop cookies, I mentioned that I had found a box of antique scissors and handed every pair to a friend who had made the mistake of saying he wanted to learn how to sharpen them. Well, I later found these cute things in a different box that probably hasn't been opened in years.

 

Getting back to the bacon, I am always a bit astonished at how much you lose when you cook it. By the time it was done, it was a shriveled husk of its former self. You'd never believe I had to cut it in half to fit it in the pan.

Moving to the other ingredients, we are supposed to drain and squeeze our spinach. (I also had a tiny bit of frozen bell peppers in a near-empty bag, so I added those too.) I think the recipe intends that we discard what we drained off, but hardly any spinach remained. 

Even if you don't fret about saving every last water-soluble vitamin, we had wrung out a lot of flavor. I didn't want to make an entire pie out of a blank-tasting wad of fiber, so I used the spinach juice to dilute the canned milk. The resulting gray-green stuff, which is full of delicious water-soluble vitamins, is theoretically the beginning of dinner. 

Incidentally, this is the first time I've used evaporated milk in something besides fudge.

Setting aside our filling ingredients, this pie came with its own crust recipe. It barely made enough dough to cover the pan. If you make it without increasing the amounts a bit, you will probably end up carefully patching every last scrap onto various holes and gaps before you're done. (It's a pretty basic pie crust recipe, so you won't lose anything special if you just get a frozen pie shell.)

Now, the first time I made this pie (yes, we liked it enough to make it again), water seeped out when I cut it. And I don't like weeping pies. So the next time, I added just a smidge of flour to the pie filling. After whisking the lumps away, we were ready to put all of this together.

Even if you just buy a frozen pie crust and pre-cooked bacon, you will spend a fair amount of time prepping your ingredients for this recipe, only to dump it all into one bowl at the end. 

All the ingredients landed in one big mound in the center of the pie crust. I had to do some spoon-nudging to even everything out.

 

This isn't at all pretty, but we hadn't yet crowned the pie with cheese. I was pleasantly surprised that the recipe calls for actual cheddar instead of American cheese. Maybe using real cheese set Linda Lee Bauman apart from all the other contenders and won her the prize.

This pie was absolutely fantastic. I can see why it won a bakeoff prize. It's rich without being overwhelming, and a good serving of vegetables without being punitive. Also, the spices seeped into the pie crust and turned it into a pretty good half-approximation of herbed breadsticks. And as an added bonus, the leftover pie slices were unexpectedly sturdy. I could just stack them in the storage container and none of them fell apart.