Vegetarian Egg Bake Recipe

Hello and welcome!

This week my table at my MOMS (Moms Offering Moms Support) group had the responsibility of bringing food. This is one way the group avoids a fee to be a member. Moms volunteer to bring food or help in the kid area to lessen the cost of catering or child care. We still have church staff member who run the kid area but the moms rotate in helping. The food is rotated from table to table and catered by the leadership staff for special events, like our Christmas or Mother's Day brunches. Have I mentioned how much I love this group?

My co-table leader let our group know that her oven died a few days before the weekly meeting, she had signed up for a quiche but that wasn't going to happen with her oven down. She asked if someone else could bring a hot dish to cover her. She would bring a cold one. Another wonderful lady (they are all wonderful actually!!) from our table offered a hot dish and I offered to bring an egg dish. 

Luckily for me Costco had the 5 dozen egg carton at a great discount ($7.50 for 5 dozen!). We still had several eggs left from last pay period but it was too good a deal to pass up. I always keep spinach and tomatoes in my fridge and there are usually hashbrowns in my freezer for MOMS related casseroles. Luckily this week I had decided to buy mushrooms with no intended purpose but something told me to. After looking at several online recipes and being short on several items I decided to throw something together based on what I had. The ladies liked it, so I thought I would share it with you lovely people!

Vegetarian Egg Bake

Ingredients:

12 large eggs

½ cup Half and Half

½ tsp Dried Thyme

3-4 mushrooms, sliced or diced

2 small handfuls of spinach, chopped if desired

1-2 cloves garlic, minced

2 cups frozen hash browns

½ cup shredded cheddar (optional)

Salt and Pepper to taste

Topping: ½ cup fresh tomato, diced

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Sauté, over medium-high heat, 1 tbsp olive oil or butter and mushrooms.  When mushrooms begin to brown, add garlic, sauté 10 seconds (until fragrant). Add spinach and cook until wilted. Add hash browns, stirring occasionally, cook for 2 minutes until hash browns are warm. Place veggie mixture in an 8x8 greased casserole dish. Let cool slightly.

In a separate bowl mix 12 eggs, half and half, salt, pepper and thyme. Whisk until combined.

Add cheese, if desired, to veggie mixture, add egg mix to veggie mixture and stir gently to combine.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until egg mixture is set and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool for 5 minutes, top if diced fresh tomato, if desired.

Makes 8-12 servings. 

Click Here for printable PDF

Here are some pictures of the cooking and final product!

Ingredients

Sauted Mushrooms, Garlic and Spinach

Veggie Mix, cooling

Egg Mix

Adding Cheddar (in our opinion makes it better)

All mixed up and ready to bake

Ready to Eat!! 

You are not alone!

Hi there!

As the arrival of my 4th child approaches rapidly I am reminded of all of the feelings that come with newborns. Joy, terror, elation, exhaustion, shock and calm, etc.  As a person who struggled with depression and anxiety throughout most of my 20's I have always been flagged as "high risk" for postpartum depression. While I have experienced bouts of crying and feelings of "how in the hell do I do this?", I have never officially been treated for postpartum depression. Perhaps my previous experiences with keeping my depression and anxiety in check without meds has given me tools to process these hormonal mood swings, maybe it's just not that bad. Either way, I am a big proponent of mental health care and especially care for mental health postpartum. It's scary as hell when they hand you a baby, assist you for 1-3 days then send you home with a few vague pamphlets on infant care. Where's the mom care info? This video made me laugh after my 2nd was born. Could have used it the first time around! WhatsUpMoms Elle: How to Recover *Down There*

The arrival of my 3rd!

Yet, there is still a lack of mental care info!

All my babies so far

They always recommend rest. Pft. Rest, right. The newborn's days and nights are backwards and we need to get breastfeeding established; but yeah, I'll nap. My DH is an amazing man but still only 1 person and goes back to work after a week or so. We have 3 other kids under the age of 7! My 4 year old likes to say "Mommy!" until I answer, always getting closer to my ear and ever louder until I respond. They give you a website and a phone number for counselors and a single page of info on new mommy classes at the hospital. While this bit of info is wonderful it just seems lacking. Plus new moms feel such pressure to be perfect. There is an extreme fear that if you don't do everything "perfectly" than you're not a good mom. This can be very isolating. What is perfect though? You! No matter what, you are the perfect mother for your child. My saving grace after my kids births was a determination to not be a hermit. To make myself take them all to the grocery store, to go to the park. Always keeping it as short as possible and trying to go between feedings (I hate feeding in public).

Most of all I recommend finding a Moms group or some other kind of support group of women and moms in all sorts of stages of parenthood and with all different ages of kids. My church's MOMS (Moms Offering Moms Support) group has been wonderful in reminding me that my kid is not the only one with night terrors (Oh yes.) or that I'm not the only homeschooler on the planet or I'm not the only woman with the desire to have 4 kids! If you find the right group they'll love you if you haven't washed your hair in a week or if you couldn't be bothered to change out of your pj's. They'll just be happy you made it.

Lastly, there are a few amazing books that have helped me through hard times as a mom.

1. Out of the Spin Cycle-Devotions to Lighten Your Mother Load
2. What Every Mom Needs
3. I'm a Mom! Now What?

Goodnight Moms!

Spring break for homeschoolers? How does that work?

Well, late is better than never. This week was officially spring break for my crew. While technically only my oldest is of school age and it's not a huge change, one takes for granted all of the activities that go on to keep you busy in a week.

As mentioned in my title, we homeschool. Well, kind of. Really my oldest is part of a "Partial Homeschooling" program that is technically integrated with her school district. She goes to a school that does electives one day a week and all day class one day a week. I am responsible for her schooling the other 3 days. At home I teach Language Arts and Math. We use the online program K12 and her teacher creates that math curriculum for me to follow at home. My oldest being a natural introvert, this program is well suited to her.

Miss. H on her 1st day of 1st Grade

How did I decide to homeschool, you ask? This decision came gradually. Ask me 10 years ago if I would homeschool and I would have given you a funny look and say "Yeah right!". Then after my first was born and we began to approach pre-school stage I met an assortment of women who homeschooled. They were not introduced to me as homeschoolers but as I got to know them they began to describe their children and their involvement in their kids schooling, I was intrigued. It seemed to me that all of the preconceived notions that I had about homeschooled kids wasn't true. These kids were social, well rounded, well educated and loved being homeschooled. I began to look at options and how homeschooling worked. Let me just say, without direction and some guidance it can be wholly overwhelming.

After 6 months of reading about curriculum, certification programs, Washington State homeschool law, I still didn't know where to begin. Then my daughter began to see kids going on the bus, tv programs about kids in school and hearing about school from older kids. She wanted to go to a class, have lunch with kids, have a true teacher. I prayed long and hard about what to do. My heart was called to homeschool, her heart was called to class. Enter a good friend of mine and the savior to many of my mom questions. She was also a homeschooler and a provider of many of the answers to my homeschool questions. She mentioned to me a program that she had decided to send her oldest to, a program unlike any I had heard of.  This program was run through our school district and was no extra cost (bonus!), the kids are in school 2 days a week. Day 1, electives, the kids can choose up to 3 classes that range from foreign language to science to drama. Day 2, class with a licensed instructor. In class they cover social studies, science, english (though most is done at home) and some math (again, mostly done at home). After two years in this program we adore this school. The staff and teachers are amazing people, the class sizes are small, the home programs are easy to work with and we still get to enjoy things like field trips and school plays.

Well this is just an intro into the massive world of homeschooling. Comment if you'd like to see more of what an actual day looks like for us.