They were pretty good leftovers, too, let me tell you: Shrimp Creole from a recipe given to my husband years ago by one of his cohorts at the News Desk, Starling Ennis. One of these days I’ll remember to take pictures while I’m making it.
I had not even finished assembling ingredients when His Majesty comes looking for his lunch. “What are you making?” he asks.
“Quiche. Real Men eat leftover Shrimp Creole.” He gets busy with the microwave while I chop some green onions and sprinkle them in my pre-made out-of-the-freezer pie shell. You have no idea how big a mess making pie crust can be until you start sprinkling 
flour on your work surface, flouring the rolling pin, remembering too late to put on an apron. Put on apron; wipe hands on apron. No, no, not today. Today is deep-dish pie shell from the freezer day.
Strain the pineapple really well. Drink the juice. Chop some ham in little bitty pieces. Sprinkle pineapple and ham over the onions and top with lots of cheese.
Here it is before cheese. I will mix 3/4 cup of half and half with three eggs and some white pepper. White pepper has an undefinable tang, different from but equal to the black pepper zing. Try it; you’ll like it.
Here you go: cheese all over, and a bowlful of eggs and half and half, sprinkled with white pepper. I really should have beaten the eggs first, but I like the look of the yolks peeking up through the rich milk. So here we go: first break the yolks and then stir like crazy. A good whisk is your best friend if you don’t want to get the mixer out. I’ve been preparing meals for over sixty years, so I take every short-cut I can find!
I washed dishes in hot soapy water, before air-conditioning was invented, scalded them and sweated like crazy. One house we rented fifty years ago had a built in dishwasher: top-loading and gravity drain, but it got them clean. I never minded scraping and stacking dishes neatly, it was the hot water washing in the southern heat that put me off. Once I discovered there was a machine to wash my dishes, I have never been without one since. The one I have now is built into the kitchen using the cutting board top from a previous free-standing one. Uh, back to the quiche.
Pour the beaten eggs and milk onto everything else. Pick it up on one side and give it a little shimmy-shake if it doesn’t want to cover all the cheese. Help it out. Then put it in a 350 degree F oven for 40 minutes; eyeball it to see if it needs another five minutes. When you are satisfied, take it out and let cool a while before cutting your first slice, or you will burn your tongue. Smells delicious, but wait a bit.
And here it is, on a cooling rack, on my cutting-board dishwasher top, under the eyes of the ever-watchful cookie jar.
Yum! Was this ever good, or maybe I was just so hungry, but this is a picture of my Second Piece:
It’s good warm, and at room temperature, too. It will be a good after-school snack for my teen-age granddaughter coming over for the weekend!
But remember that it is protein, a good growing environment for bacteria, so refrigerate the left-overs. Nuke a piece just to get the chill off. You don’t want to over-cook protein or it will get tough.
Happy Eating!
Hello! I'm a grandma now, and a stay at home retiree who reads and writes and crochets a lot, and spends entirely too much time at the computer keyboard.
