Meatless Monday: Caramelized Onion Pie

While most of our dinners include meat, every now and again I'll go for something meatless. Using eggs, hearty caramelized onions, cheese and cream seems a decent substitute to me. This pie is quiche-adjacent but "onion pie" sounds so much lovelier in my opinion.

I started out melting anchovies into some olive oil.

Yes they are little tiny fish and yes they melt into the oil and yes you should try this at least once in your life. They add a crazy delicious layer of flavor but it isn't fishy. If you're skeeved out by little fishies, try anchovy paste. This is totally not required for the recipe but I'm telling you - anchovy fillets/anchovy paste will be an amazing addition to your pantry. Trust me.

Once the anchovies melted into the oil, I caramelized three large Vidalia onions sliced into half moons. I used an absolutely massive pan and this took a long time and, as is always the case with caramelized onions, it was completely worth the wait. While the onions caramelized, I created a filling mix from 1/2 c light cream, 4 eggs, 7 oz or so of part skim ricotta cheese, chopped fresh chives, salt and pepper.

Judge me - I used store bought crust from the freezer section. It comes in a stack of two in a disposable foil pan. The onions took long enough that I wasn't messing around with a homemade dough.

Spread about a teaspoon of Dijon mustard on the base of the crust. This sounded intriguing when I first read a SK recipe but I assure you now it is a silent star of the dish.

I topped the mustard layer with about half of the onions.

Then I added about half of the cream/ricotta/egg filling. I sprinkled the top with gruyère cheese and baked at 400 degrees for about 25 minutes.

Holy deliciousness, am I right?

I served a (probably too) large wedge of the pie with a fresh green salad to balance out all the butter in the crust and the cream in the filling. The salad is baby spinach and the dressing is balsamic vinegar, lemon-infused olive oil and some regular olive oil, salt and pepper, and a hefty shake of za'atar.

There was SO MUCH FILLING that I ended up just baking a second one of these while we ate our dinner (remember, there were two crusts in the freezer pack I bought). We ate it a few nights later with another delicious green salad and it was still SO delicious. So basically, cut everything in my recipe in half and you’ll have one pie, or do everything in my recipe and have leftovers!