HAPPY BLOGGIVERSARY, TO ME!

OMG I can't believe I missed my own blog's birthday--crap! No wonder I wanted to make cake today!! I started out by reading Donna Hay's No Time To Cook--which is kind of a lie since it was just late and I was feeling lazy--but then I read someone's blog about Baked Eggs from someone else's cookbook (sorry for the vagueness) and decided to go with that for tomorrow's lunch. But then halfway through the process I remembered the leftover lamb shoulder sitting in my fridge in my bedroom (I have a mini fridge in there, sorry Earth) and decided to dig it out. I then used my bare hands to rip off the remaining meat (kind of gross) and came up with this:
Everything-Into-The-Bowl Casserole
- leftover lamb shoulder meat, cut into small chunks
- leftover roast potato, cut into small chunks
- leftover rice from leftover lamb shoulder dinner (a really small amount, 1/4 cup? or less)
- 4 fresh shitake mushrooms
- 5 button mushrooms
- two handfuls of spinach
- 1/2 cup of Israeli couscous
- 3.5 eggs (half because one of them was the last small egg in the fridge)
- 3/4 cup of milk

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
   
2. Heat up some olive oil and saute the mushrooms for a minute or so before adding the spinach. The mushrooms will absorb all the oil but no worries, the spinach will eventually wilt, just be patient. Dump sauteed veggies into a large bowl.
3. Cook Israeli couscous according to package directions. If you don't have any directions, this is my method...1 cup of couscous to 1 1/4 cups of water. Adjust for the amount of Israeli couscous on hand. So you place your Israeli couscous, water and a pinch of salt into a pot and let it come to a boil. Once it does, turn down the heat, letting it simmer for 10 minutes. Then turn the heat off. Let it cool down a little bit and you could be able to to scrape the couscous with a fork/spoon/whatever. Dump that into the bowl.
   
4. Now add the leftovers, in my case...the lamb, potatoes and rice.
5. Taste and season if you have to with salt and pepper. I forgot to mention in my ingredients that my dinner came with a mint sauce so I added some of that into the bowl as well.
6. Beat eggs and milk together and pour into the bowl. Mix everything together carefully. This is where using a large bowl comes in handy. Add this point you could add some cheese but because I'm Asian, we didn't have any cheese on hand. (Actually, I lie...I do have parmesan cheese in the mini fridge but when going upstairs to retrieve it, I was distracted by my laptop and Fitnessista's blog and as a result, I went back downstairs without the cheese. I was too lazy to go back upstairs and get it. Anyway, don't be lazy...go get the cheese!)
7. Now dump everything into a small casserole dish...this is not the 9x13" size dish but it's also not a loaf-size dish. It's a little bit bigger than that. Anyway, dump it in and smooth everything out a little bit and stick it into the oven!
8. Bake for 35 minutes or when everything has set.
9. Take out of oven, wait to cool a teensy bit, cut a large portion onto a plate, photograph and eat!

Everything should start to smell wonderful, especially after 15 minutes and especially if you've got leftover lamb like I do but I can't tell because my dad was roasting some almonds earlier and he burned a batch of them and for some reason the house smells like buttered popcorn.

Note that I used a little too much milk, I would decrease the amount to 1/2 cup, so my quiche/casserole took longer to set. After 25 minutes it was still liquidy in the center so I let it bake for another 10 minutes and that did the job.

Happy Anniversary to my blog!