Cleaning out the fridge

For this week's egg bake, I decided to truly clean out my fridge. All I have left in there is some raspberry jam and other condiments. I need to go shopping!

The only things I had to buy were the eggs and a new carton of heavy cream. Everything else was already there. I had some old spinach and mushrooms leftover from last week, some baby carrots, a package of bacon that was getting old, and even the pan was leftover from making sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving. I kept it in the fridge so the yummy butter wouldn't be wasted. Even the cheddar cheese had been in there for a few weeks and needed to get used up.

This pan is "dirty" with delicious butter and caramelized sweet potato. Some of the naturally occurring sugar ends up leaching into the butter when you cook them properly. Lots of good flavor that I didn't want to dump down the drain. So I kept it in the fridge for a few days instead.

I actually put it on the stove top for a few minutes to melt the butter. That made it easier to spread around.

These carrots were getting boring since I ran out of hummus. So I dumped them in and rolled them around in the butter.

This spinach is looking sad, but it will still cook up nicely. I packed it on top of the carrots.

Once the bacon cooked down a little bit, I added a teaspoon or so of crushed garlic, from a jar. I probably could have added more. This jar is not very potent.

The sliced mushrooms went in after a few minutes. I put the lid on so they would soften from the steam. Then I mixed them into the bacon so they could absorb some of the fat. Later on there was still some residual fat in the frying pan, so I made some scrambled eggs for dinner. I really do love eggs. I also had a cold that day and had lost my appetite. I probably needed the protein!

It seemed like I had a lot of bacon and mushrooms, so I left some of them in the frying pan for scambled eggs too. But I still put enough in the cake pan to compress the spinach a little more.

This is about a cup and a half of cheddar. Maybe a little more. I used some of it for my scrambled eggs too. I poured the eggs over this. I used almost 2 dozen eggs this time, which also had heavy cream, salt, pepper, and cayenned mixed in with them.

I cooked it at 350 for about half an hour. By then the cheese looked perfect. The carrot were still pretty firm, but not hard. I probably could have cooked it another 10 minutes though. Then the carrots would have been a bit softer.

The carrots are fun because they are something different. Last week I had used squash and that was also delicious. It actually got better the longer it sat, as more flavor soaked into the squash. I tend to make the same things over and over again, so it is fun to change one or two of the ingredients and see how it turns out. So far so good!