Second-Stab Saturday: Spinach-Bacon Pie without all the fuss

Sometimes, recipes are a lot more work than they need to be.

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°. In a large bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs, flour, and seasonings. Then mix in the bacon and spinach. Don't drain the spinach before adding it-- mix all the juices in with everything else. Pour this into the pie shell. If needed, gently spread out the spinach if it landed in a sort of pile. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then bake about 20-25 minutes, until it puffs up on top. *Naturally, you can just cut up 6 pieces of pre-cooked bacon if you have that on hand. Adapted from 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

The spinach-bacon pie has made its way into regular rotation in this house. But all that business of juicing frozen spinach, measuring fluids, heating canned milk, and everything else got more irksome every time I made it again. So I decided to cross out the directions and just stir everything together.

At first I was worried. This pie won a Pillsbury Bakeoff prize with all its fussy instructions, so surely every step was there for a reason... right? Also, the ingredient list specifically calls for hot milk. I didn't know whether that had some crucial effect on how all the ingredients interacted in the mixing bowl. Then I decided that at worst, this would turn into spinach soup with a soggy pie crust under it.

This time, the raw filling looked more like leaves with a little bit of white mixture around them. When I squeezed and wrung the bejaysus out of the spinach as the recipe directed, we had little green shreds floating in white-ish fluid. At first I thought this might seem more like a panful of leaves than a decent pie. Then I decided that even if I never took the shortcut again, this pie couldn't possibly be bad enough to throw out.

Well, now I feel silly for posting this recipe with a long list of directions. In my defense, I was following what was originally in the book. But now we know that you can just stir this pie together.  

I really like this pie (which is why I make it so often). It's like a low-effort quiche. And for something that has such a hefty serving of vegetables, it doesn't taste like "you have to eat your vegetables." It's just plain good.