Tag Archives: frittata

Frittata with Chevre and Caramelized Onions

15 Replies

We’ve had backyard chickens in Seattle for more than a decade now.  I kind of like to think that we had city chickens before having city chickens was a thing.  (Now everyone has chickens here; you have to get backyard goats to have any urban farming cred.  J says we’re not getting goats.)  I’m sure Seattle has a home and garden tour somewhere, but I’m also sure that it’s nowhere near as popular as the city’s annual Chicken Coop Tour.

At the moment we have just three hens: Ducky, Feather, and Feather.  Lately one of the Feathers has been acting upon a likely-well-intentioned but completely misguided plan to hatch a nestfull of eggs, except that we kept taking her eggs away and, ahem, with no rooster in flock the eggs had exactly zero chance of hatching anyway.

Feather was petulant about the situation and hunkered down in one of the nesting boxes for weeks.  She would not be stirred, unless I would let her into the garden to eat my tomatoes, in which case she happily abandoned her maternal duties and left the nest for hours at a time.  Luckily Feather has abandoned her dreams of motherhood and we are getting a few eggs again (broody hens don’t lay).

Let us celebrate with a frittata.

You made a big batch of caramelized onions and froze some, right?  If not, just throw a few thinly-sliced onions in your pan over high heat and cook them until they have softened and sweetened and proceed from there.  I also like this recipe with a few leeks in place of the onions. Continue reading →

Advertisement

Pound-of-Greens Frittata

7 Replies

A frittata is one of the nicest traveling foods I know.  We made this one tonight and the leftovers will accompany me and my sister on a very Pacific Northwest-y adventure with the kids tomorrow involving ferry boats and beachcombing.

Now that CSA season is underway, packing veggies densely into every meal becomes more urgent than ever.  This frittata will help you to dispatch an onion, an enormous bunch of chard (including stems), and a bunch of spinach–or whatever equivalent greens you need to use up this week.  My bunch of chard actually weighed a pound by itself, but “24-oz-of-Greens Frittata” just doesn’t have the same ring.

The first trick here is to cook the greens very well, until they give up most of their moisture and it evaporates.  The second is to season the vegetables well before adding them to the eggs.  When you combine the soft cooked greens with half a dozen eggs, the resulting frittata is moist and rich.  Not a bad way to eat a pound of greens. Continue reading Pound-of-Greens Frittata (click for recipe)

Single-Serving Frittata with Mushrooms, Arugula, and Feta

17 Replies

I am not a morning person.

On weekdays I often scramble downstairs just as J is walking out the door.  He and the girls have been up and dressed for an hour, breakfast is over, art projects are often underway.  I burst onto the scene and immediately start searching for three tiny pairs of shoes and three even tinier pairs of socks so I can herd the kids straight out the door to get my oldest to kindergarten.  Which starts at almost 9.  This should not be a hardship.  (In my defense, my baby has been waking up all night long lately, and so have I.  But, honestly, I’d be sleeping until the last possible second no matter what.)

I am pleased to see to my family’s sweet faces in the morning, of course, but you know what else I’m always happy to see?  COFFEE.  J, inexplicably, does not drink coffee.  Which is either virtuous or insane.  But he does make it for me, a perfect French press pot of dark roast beans, ready to plunge the moment I get downstairs.  It is an act of love.

So maybe now you’re thinking that this should be a coffee recipe, but I only have one and it only involves glossy, dark-roasted coffee beans and hot water, plus maybe a pinch of cinnamon or cardamom in the grounds–try that!  Instead, my point here is that sometime it is rather late in the day before I get around to breakfast. 

A single-serving frittata is a great way to get your vegetables in at breakfast.  You can also make a big batch in muffin tins to grab on your way out the door all week, have you tried that?  I am usually not that organized, so today I made mine in my 8″ cast iron skillet.  You can use any small ovenproof skillet, or even one that’s not ovenproof, since a frittata this small is easy to flip and finish on the stovetop.

The key here, as far as I’m concerned, is to load up on the vegetables, using the egg to just hold it all together.  And since I actually used egg whites this time instead of whole eggs (the yolks went into the crust for mini Strawberry-Rhubarb cornmeal tarts), I made sure that all my ingredients were extra-flavorful and well-seasoned.  Egg whites are a great source of protein, but flavor?  Not so much.  Enter savory mushrooms, peppery arugula, and salty feta–now we’re talking. 

Continue reading Frittata with Mushrooms, Arugula, and Feta (click for recipe)