One Local Summer Meal #4
The farmer’s market this week offered a wonderful array of veggies, not to mention a surprise performance by the entire band Blackberry Wood! I scored some fresh eggs from the back of a truck, which were marvelously varied in size. A few of them were so gigantic, they looked too big to eat hardboiled in one sitting. These great big eggs instead inspired me to find another use for them instead... some kind of scrambled... dinnery thing...
I’d never made frittata before, but could vaguely recall a former roommate’s attempt. It turned out bland, and variously rubbery and watery. The communal household dubbed it “shittata” but ate it anyways, glumly, with a side of the baked potatoes with plain yoghurt that we ate every single day that winter. Afterwards we probably watched some hockey.
With that experience in mind, I found a few well-recommended recipes from the internet and adapted them to include fresh baby spinach, yellow zucchini and yellow (hothouse) pepper. The lady at the Little Qualicum Cheeseworks booth recommended Turkish Paneer as a substitute for feta - I was initially suspicious, but it worked great and is really delicious on salads too.
If you are curious, here’s approximately how the frittata got made*.
*The following recipe was unwittingly written entirely using the passive voice, for which an apology is hereby offered.
- Garlic scapes and mushrooms fried in butter in the bottom of a pot
- Chopped-up zucchini and pepper added and cooked until soft
- Chopped-up spinach added and cooked until most of the water evapourated off
- Meanwhile, 4 giganta-eggs scrambled up in a dish with a few chives and 1 cup of crumbled paneer (= feta cheese).
- Beaten eggs added into the pot, and everything mixed up. (At this point, I also threw in a tablespoon of the delicious hot pepper sauce which Zach brought home from California.)
- Everything cooked in the pot for about four minutes, until almost done.
- The half-cooked mess transferred into a pie plate*, and baked in the oven at 375° for about 20 minutes - until i was convinced that any water floating around in there was from the spinach and not uncooked egg.
- Flipped onto a plate for serving and cut into slices.
- Eaten with more pepper sauce, and a predictable side of the ever-present steamed potatoes with chives.
* Here's where my technique became inefficient due to the lack of a proper oven-safe dish. With the proper dish, which could be used on both the element and in the oven, the eggs and other ingredients could be popped into the oven in the same vessel where they had been cooked all along.
The leftovers made a pretty good cold breakfast!