Sausage & Cheese Quiche

I stumbled across a nifty little on-line tool the other day while looking for a recipe to match some leftover ingredients: the Allrecipes Ingredient Search function. It asks you which ingredients you want to include in a particular recipe (as well as those you don't, if desired) and it spits out those recipes in its database that match the specified criteria. In my case, I was looking to free my refrigerator of 3 orphan eggs about to expire, about 1/2 c. of chopped parsley leftover from my making pasta sauce the other night, about a cup of half-and-half remaining from the penne pomodoro al secco (see last posting), and a little bit of unused shredded cheese from a New Year's taco dip. I entered these ingredients into the search tool and out popped sausage mushroom quiche, which was pretty much spot-on to what I was seeking. Now, given my rabid dislike of mushrooms, I quietly opted to replace them with a chopped up green pepper and onion in the recipe. I also decided to use only 1/2 lb. of sausage (as opposed to a full pound) after reading the associated recipe reviews, several of which stated that you could probably cut down on the sausage without much difference (you can, actually).

To my best recollection, I'd only made quiche once before, but with a pre-fab uncooked Pillsbury pie shell, it was pretty easy to throw together and made a tasty meal on a cold winter night. The only slip-up I made was not leaving it in the oven quite long enough (25 minutes instead of 30 or 35 even) - it ended up a little looser than I'd hoped, also possibly due to the extra moisture from the green pepper/onion in the filling. Mrs. Hackknife found it acceptable, if not decent, Hackknife Jr. picked at it a little, Hackknifette poignantly declined to eat any, and I was happy to rid my fridge of the offending articles without further adding to the local landfill woes.