Cheesy Sausage & Egg Pie, Simple & Easy Southern Cooking

Hey y'all, I'm Tammy, and this is Collard Valley Cooks. Today we're making a sausage, egg, and cheese pie. Some might call it a quiche, but us country folks just say pie. It's got a pie crust under it, and boy is it good. I'm gonna show you how to make it. The first thing we're going to do is bake our pie crust. You're gonna pre-bake it, and whether you're using a frozen one, a homemade one, or I like to use the refrigerated pie crusts, you're gonna get that in the oven and pre-bake it until it's golden brown, all right? So about 400 degrees is good, and we're just gonna take this pie shell and put it in our Pyrex dish. This is just a standard Pyrex dish that I'm using, and that's how I place it, and I can't remember what brand this is. I'm pretty sure it's Aldi, and what I like about the Aldi brand of pie crust is it's plenty big. You can tell it's got plenty of room in this pie shell. It's got plenty of room in the shell to make a nice crimped edge, and that's just really nice, all right? So you're just gonna put it in there, go around the edge at the bottom. We'll put a couple of holes in it, okay? And then I usually just bend this over and fold it. If it has an overlap, just kind of fold it over like so, and then we're just gonna do the standard pinching of it. Now, my mama used frozen pie crusts. My grandmother used frozen pie crusts. All my grandmothers did. They all used the frozen pits, Ritz pie crusts back then, and a lot of you still use them, but man, if you ever try one of these, it only takes a second to put them together, and they are just hands down delicious to me, and I like them better than homemade. I know a lot of y'all think everything's gotta be made homemade, but I really like these better than my homemade ones because to me, they're just delish. All right, once you get the crust in here, make sure you put a few holes in it, especially around the corners before you get it in the oven to pre-bake it, and while we're doing that, we can brown our sausage. Now, today, we are using my favorite sausage, the best sausage on the planet to me, breakfast sausage, and that is Swaggerdy's. Now, they do make Italian-style sausage. They make brats. They make smoked sausage. They make smoked sausage, so all of their products are really good. This is the hot. The next time you're in the grocery store, look for Swaggerdy's. Look where the sausage is in the fresh meat department and also, or like where the bacon and stuff is, also look in the freezer. Sometimes they don't have it except in the freezer in patties. Please give it a try. You will, so glad you did. I think we'll use about a half pound in this quiche today, so I'm just gonna cut this in half, and I'm sure there's fancier ways to do this than the way I do it, but I'm just gonna put two slits inside, and we're gonna put it over here in the skillet, and we're gonna start browning it, and I don't have this preheated yet, so it'll take it a minute to get hot. It's not real fatty, okay, so I'm just gonna kinda pull it apart a little bit, put it in my skillet, and we'll use the meat separator to get it separated really good as well, and this is gonna be really good in our quiche with our fresh eggs. We're gonna chop up a little onion to go in this. It'll make it delicious. We're also gonna use a little onion powder as well. I did wipe off my cutting board, if you're wondering, because it did have a little sausage on it. So we're just taking the skin off that onion. We're gonna chop it and dice it tiny, but, you know, chop it pretty good for our quiche, and we may even throw it in there with our sausage real quick, okay? So we're gonna get ahead and get this chopped up while that sausage starts up so that I can saute it a little bit with the sausage, okay? So this is a little onion, but it's gonna be the perfect amount for what we need. It's just a regular yellow onion, not a sweet onion, but you can use whatever kind of onion you have, even if it's green onion. Just use some onion. And like I said, we're also gonna add a little onion powder. It'll just be really good. Now, if for some reason you want your onions to be more solid and stronger in flavor, because remember, when you saute onion, it does make it a milder flavor. I don't like to saute onion for my dressing and some things, but then other things, I do like to saute it. So it's up to you whether or not you want this to be more of a crunch with a stronger flavor, you would leave it raw, or if you wanna go ahead and add it to your sausage. Either way, it gets in there and it's gonna be good. So let me get my little meat separator. If you've never seen one of these, this is a meat separator. They're pretty cheap on the website. The good thing about going through our website to order stuff is that it gets delivered right to your door and you don't have to go around, walk around the store and try to find it. And most of the time, it's a pretty doggone good price, especially for it to be delivered through Amazon. I love it. The way that my back has been this week, I actually decided to get in the swimming pool. People wonder why I don't exercise. When you got fibromyalgia and different things, it really is hard. And I got in the swimming pool and I decided that I was gonna exercise a little bit in the swimming pool. And y'all haven't seen me for a few days because I pulled a muscle in my back and so I've been recuperating from that pulled muscle for several days. So it sure is nice to be able to get things from Amazon. It gets delivered right to the door and I don't have to go walk around and try to find something. All right. Just thought I'd tell you that because it really does make a difference for me and people like me. All right. I tell you to use half and half and here in the United States, when we go to the grocery store or at least where we live down in Southeast United States, we can get half and half, which is half cream, half milk. A lot of people use it in their coffee. This is a good recipe for a quiche. It's gonna be nice and fluffy. And I call for a cup of half and half. If you live in other parts, you're gonna use half milk, half cream. Evaporated milk is considered cream and I'm making my own half and half today with regular milk and evaporated milk. You can see how the separator really separates that sausage and that's the way you want the texture to be in a quiche. You don't want big hunks of sausage. You want it to be nice and uniform and pretty and it's gonna be good y'all. This is ready. I'm gonna turn it off. It's gonna be ready to add to the rest of the ingredients. And I will give you a tip on this. If you use these, lots of times the meat gets tongue around the corners and the dishwasher really don't do it justice. So I like to use a brush and some sudsy water to clean these hamburger separators. That's just a tip from me, Tammy's tip to you. And that way you know it's gonna be clean. All right, we're about to mix up this pie. I'm gonna call this a sausage and cheese pie. Me and Chris are gonna have it for lunch today. You'll be watching this probably at dinnertime. It is a good and hearty, delicious pie. So we've got six room temperature eggs. We're gonna get those in the bowl and we're gonna beat them well. Once you get these beat up good, and if you want to, you can use a mixer. It's totally up to you. You can add your cream. You're gonna add half teaspoon of onion powder, half teaspoon of black pepper. And if you wanna reduce the pepper, you can. If you wanna use quarter teaspoon, but I love pepper with my eggs, so that's totally up to you. To me, it's the perfect blend. All right, we're gonna use a couple of tablespoons of butter. You can use butter or you can use mayonnaise, however you wanna do it. Because I'm using butter, I gotta zap it a little bit because I don't want it, it's gonna be harder to mix it up when it's like this, even if it is room temperature. So I'm just gonna stick this in my microwave and let it just melt just a hair. Now you don't want it to be real hot because you don't want it to cook your eggs, okay? So put it on the soften or melt setting in the microwave or you can use mayonnaise, however you wanna do it. It just gives a little oil in there. And we like butter, so that's what I'm using. Now we're gonna mix this up. Now do a good job beating it. If you don't have a strong arm, use a mixer. Hand mixer's fine, of course. All right, before we add our cheese and sausage, we're going to add a quarter cup of self-rising flour and that's gonna make this fluff up nice and pretty. If you don't have self-rising, use all-purpose and add a half teaspoon of baking powder, okay? Only if you don't have the self-rising. So get this beat up in there good. Now we're gonna add a cup of shredded mild cheddar. You can use whatever cheese you got on hand. You don't have to make a special trip to the store. So you're gonna put a good cup in the mix and then you're gonna put some on top of the pie to bake, okay? So we're just gonna mix it up in there. Pour it in our pie shell. So there we have our cheese in there. Now we're gonna add our sausage and onion. Now this sausage is not real greasy, so there's really no need to drain it, but if you buy a different brand, you may need to drain the grease off of it some before you add it in your pie. Me and Chris are hungry and we're ready to eat this pie, aren't we, baby? All right. Gonna pour this in our pie crust. It's a little too much, y'all. It's gonna drain a little out. I put a little few extra eggs in it. I put six eggs in it instead of four just because we got so many chicken eggs and maybe I shouldn't have. I'll tell y'all to use four. All right. Or maybe you should just add it until it's full because I don't know what kind of pie shell you're gonna have anyway. Y'all make sure and get you, if you get a frozen one, get you a Marie Callender deep dish. Make sure if you're making this, you use a deep dish pie. Do you use a deep dish pie? You may not have the problem that I just had. Just add your filling in it instead of dumping it all in at one time so that you don't make a mess like I did. Sometimes I make messes. Another thing you can do is put something underneath the pie in case for some reason it spills over, especially if you got two racks in your oven. I don't have two racks in my oven. So I lay it down on the bottom. It's not gonna hurt because I don't put it where the air comes around the corners. And that way, if for some reason it were to try to spill, it will land on that instead of something I gotta clean up later. But with egg in there, it should just puff up and rise. It shouldn't spill over, all right? So we're gonna keep an eye on this. I'll show it to you in about 20 minutes. It's gonna bake for about 40. All right, y'all, our casserole is done and you saw me put the cheese on there for the last 10 minutes. Now, when I put the cheese on there, the egg was still a little runny in the middle, but I did turn on my convection. If you don't have convection, that's fine. You're just gonna have to bake it a little longer. But before you get it out, make sure you stick something right in the middle and make sure that raw egg is not on there. And it looks done to me. Eggs have set up and they've cooked, so I'm gonna put it right out here. We're gonna let it cool off a minute and then we're gonna slice this a delicious piece. Me and Chris are really hungry. We are ready to eat it. And I mean, that crust is perfectly golden. Looks great. Should be a really good recipe that everybody's gonna love. Smells so good. The house smells delicious. All right, this is really a lot like our fireman's casserole except it's got a pie crust under it, which makes it even better to me. And this is great for if you don't have a huge crowd and you don't wanna make a casserole version of something that's so big, this is perfect for two of you or four of you, okay? So we are going to cut into this delicious pie and it is hot, we're starving. So we're going to attempt this while the pie's hot and everybody likes breakfast anyway, while it's good and warm. So that's what we're gonna do. Now, the pie crust that I used was the Aldi and I do wanna tell you this about an Aldi pie crust. It is the only pie crust that is a refrigerated pie crust that to me is not oily enough. It will actually stick to your pan, whatever you're using, whether it's a cast iron and you're making my chicken pot pie or whether you're making a pie in a pie plate. So you might want to spray your pie plate just a little bit if you're using the Aldi type refrigerated pie crust. I've never gotten another one that wasn't oily enough but this one is a little drier, just a heads up on that. Now this is a quiche as well, but you know, I never had a quiche growing up but I probably would have had something like this and it not be called a quiche. Look at that cheese, Louise. Well, that looks good, don't it? Delish. All right, let's give it a try, y'all. Now I don't wanna get burnt. It is hot. So let me let it cool just about, I think I'm gonna let this cool about five minutes and then I'm gonna taste it for y'all because I don't wanna burn my mouth with this cheese. It's full of cheese and boy, is it gonna be good. I'm super excited. I'm starving, but we'll be right back. And remember, this is egg. It's like a souffle. So when this is cooking in the oven, you're gonna see the egg puff up around the edges first. That's what's gonna cook first. And you really need to wait until the middle comes up as well so that the whole pie is good and set, okay? You can tell by looking at this piece of pie, if I cut into it for you around where the edge is, how it's nice and set, you know, and it looks like solid. And that's how you want the pie to look, okay? So make sure you cook it long enough and you're gonna love it. You might have to cook an hour instead of 40 minutes and that's okay. Just make sure it's good and done. Let's get us a bite. Very good. Got a lot of flavor. You taste the onion, the cheese, the sausage. Yummy, very yummy. Really good. Now you can mix this up ahead of time and cook it and just warm it in the oven as well if you want to have it for a special occasion. I'm gonna let Chris taste it for you guys. We're about an hour late for lunch. I'm really hungry. And that is really good. Yes, I know. I'm really ready to eat. Man, that is good. Delicious. And one of the reasons it's so good- Should I stop eating? Oh, you don't have to. I know you're hungry. Eat the rest of the day? Yes. I like the crust on it too. Don't you? It's good. It's really good. Now we just want to give a special shout out to Swaggerdy's Farm. They are out of Tennessee and they are a sponsor of Colored Valley Cooks. So this video is sponsored by Swaggerdy Farms. And boy, do we love being sponsored by them. Don't we, Chris? We get all the sausage that we need. And so we'll be making y'all something else. I'd like to make something like lasagna with their Italian sausage next. That would be good, wouldn't it, Chris? Boy, he's just eating this thing up. We thank you for watching Colored Valley Cooks where we cook like our mamas did. Y'all have a wonderful Father's Day and we just love ya. Appreciate ya. Y'all hit that like and subscribe button and we'll see you the next time. Bye y'all. Love ya.