Minis

One of the greatest gifts our friends and families blessed us with after coming home from the hospital with Miller was to organize and treat us to meals and snacks for those first few weeks of acclimating to a new baby.

Every other day we'd get an email or phone call from someone ready to know what time they could deliver the goods.  Sometimes they stayed and shared a meal with us.  Sometimes they stayed just long enough to smile at Miller and do our piles of dirty dishes.  It was all so so SO heavenly.

Although I still owe one of two families that just had a new baby a foodie stock up (and don't even try to say "it's not necessary" because "it's so happening anyway", you know who you are...), I did manage to visit my dear friend, Erin, last week with some of my personal favorite food goodies.

I may have also just wanted to visit her to coo at her beautiful new baby.

{I forget how tiny newborns really are... and how they don't tell you "NO" every time you need to them to put on clothes.}

Instead of a full meal, I brought Erin and her husband a variety of fresh fruits as well as a dozen mini quiches which could be frozen and popped in the microwave for a quick breakfast, snack, power boost, etc.

{These cooling buddies have spinach, corn, tomatoes and zucchinis}

I used a friend's family quiche recipe (which I don't know if I have the liberty to share on here, but it is VERY similar to this one here from epicurious- which can easily be modified to suit your own cheese/meat/veggie likes or fridge inventories).

I rolled out some store bought pie crusts, cut them into square-esque shapes, molded them into buttered muffin pans and spooned out the quiche mixture goodness.  (Some recipes call for you to bake a pie crust a bit before you add the egg mixture.  Instead, I just made sure to turn the oven down a tad and let them cook for a few minutes longer.  Eyeballing and covering with foil if necessary.)

After they had cooled awhile in the muffin pans, I slid a knife around the mini quiches and popped them out to cool completely before bagging them up (with a square of parchment in between each one) into a double sealed freezer bag.

When a snack craving hits, all the new parents need to do is pop one (or two... or six) into the microwave for about a minute and VIOLA! something other than a nutri-grain bar and a bowl of cheez-its for a 3pm (or 3am) food emergency.

Of course I doubled the recipe and had to make a large quiche for my own family too.  When in Rome, right?  Or rather when I'm surrounded by cheese and pie crust, right?