Tigger Quiche Glop

The Glop, in preparation: noodles and mushroom stems cooking

The Glop, ready to serve; I didn't have any spinach on hand this time

a different Glop, on 2022/12/04, with lots of spinach

Tigger Quiche Glop is a Woozle original recipe loosely based on Tigger Noodle Mess, except with eggs and cheese. It evolved from being told "you can't just cook macaroni and then dump cheese on it and get macaroni and cheese"; experimentation proved that yes, indeed, you can do exactly this and also it is clearly the best way to make macaroni and cheese. ...and then further experiments were done...

Ingredients

• a bunch of pasta noodles
• shredded leftover roast chicken -- whatever you've got that nobody wants to eat
• 2-3 eggs per chicken-leg-weight-equivalent
• a handful or so of shredded cheese
  • Mozzarella is good for making it stringy; "Mexican mix" is good for adding a bit of flavor and smoother texture. Whatever cheese you'd like on your mac-and-, really.
• optional:
  • extra virgin olive oil (XVOO)
  • chopped mushrooms, any kind
  • leftover spinach, raw or cooked
  • leftover chicken goop (i.e. what's left in the pan after roasting)
  • any other interesting leftover edible liquids, e.g. the preservative-water from a jar of peppers

(Although this recipe is pretty flexible, I generally avoid using tomato products -- but I think that's mainly because I'm the only one here who is fond of tomatoes. Feel free to experiment.)

Procedure

• Fill pot about 2/3 with filtered water.
• Put over high heat.

While waiting for it to boil:

• add salt and whatever spices seem suitable (e.g. basil, oregano, pepper...)
• crack however many eggs into a mixing bowl, and scramble them with a fork (or whatever you prefer)
• If any of the mushrooms I have to work with are stems (we often end up with shiitake stems), I put those in now -- they're a little tougher, and more cooking seems to help.

When it's just starting to boil:

• pour in a bunch of the XV olive oil.
• ...and then dump in all the pasta. Be sure to stir it until it floats loosely around.
• Turn down heat to medium-high, i.e. low boil.

When the pasta starts to get soft:

• add the mushrooms, spinach, and chicken.
• If the spinach is cooked, you can wait a minute or two; it just needs to be heated and mixed in. Chopping it can help distribute it more evenly.
• This is why you need that remaining 1/3 of the pot.

When the pasta is as soft as you want it:

• Turn off the heat.
• Drain the water (smart people use a colander; I hold the lid on the pot at an angle and burn my right-hand with the steam and sometimes bits of the contents escape into the sink but this is the price of progress, amiright?) -- this needs to be very thorough, or the eggs won't cook properly. Give it at least 30 seconds of draining.
• Put the drained pot back on the burner.
  • If you're using gas or induction, maybe turn it on low to help the eggs? A resistive-electric burner will still be plenty warm at this point.
• Add the scrambled eggs and stir. Surprisingly, most of the cooking seems to happen inside the still-very-hot noodles (which are, at this point, Mostly Water™) rather than the base of the pan -- but I feel like having that extra incoming heat helps the process along.
  • That said, folks in our household with sensitive stomachs have found that maybe the eggs aren't being cooked as much as one would like. Another option would be to scramble the eggs separately, then mix them in; cooking them in the pasta is just easier, not better.
• Add shredded cheese and stir, until it looks suitably messy.
• Add more XVOO, because that stuff is good.

I feel like there should be garlic at some point, but I haven't worked out how to do this in a way that is both painless and actually contributes to the end result. If you've got someone who doesn't mind chopping fresh garlic, I'd think maybe chopping 2-5 pieces into halves or quarters and then adding them right near the end would work nicely, but I haven't actually tried this.