I LOVE frittatas. I love creating a huge Italian omelette full of as many delicious things as I possibly can and then having a beautiful, rustic meal at the end of it. Herein lie my two core problems. I lack the patience, and more importantly the dexterity to be able to create a proper stove-top frittata (I cannot create an in-stove one as all of my frying pans have plastic handles and are non-stick). So today, I improvised.
I knew when I was making this that it was never going to win any prizes for beauty. This was oddly cathartic and meant that I could throw in whatever I wanted without worrying about how it was going to come out. This was a purely taste-and-smell driven exercise and my goodness it was delicious.
A frittamble is my attempt at a cute and kitsch name for a hybrid of a frittata and scrambled eggs - think the equivalent in culinary nomenclature of 'labradoodle'.
The process was simple: Get as many vegetables as possible into a pan and cook them with as many eggs as I could spare (3 and a half - I had a leftover egg white in the fridge from my turkey burger adventure earlier in the week) and make sure that it was all properly set and cooked through by repeatedly gouging and bludgeoning the dish with a spatula. There are no pictures. I was too hungry during the cooking process to have the forethought to locate my camera.
Frittamble -- serves 3 hungry people or 4 reasonably hungry people if there's a salad.
Ingredients:
A good drizzle of olive oil (probably a tablespoon, but you could use more if you felt it necessary)
3 and a half eggs - well-beaten (The half helped -- I suspect 4 would have been lovely but 5 might have made it too rich).
6 smallish boiled potatoes, skins on, cut into roughly half-inch cubes.
4 good-sized banana shallots, sliced into thin half-moons (use an onion if you've got one - I just love the bitter caramel taste of burned shallot).
A red pepper, halved, cored, relieved of pith and sliced into half-cm squiggles.
8-10 cherry tomatoes, halved
A handful of curly kale (a green in this is essential)
A half-teaspoon of paprika (smoked would be best)
A hearty grinding of black pepper
Cayenne pepper if you're like me and add it to pretty well everything. Add to taste.
Method:
Fry the shallots in the oil first over a low-medium heat. Get them golden brown with a few little stragglers turning crispy, or even a little burnt if that's your thing (that's how I like them). Keep them moving. You'll need to pop back to the stove frequently to prevent them all from turning to charcoal.
Next, add in your peppers and kale and allow to cook until the peppers are floppy, stirring frequently.
Then add in your potatoes and tomatoes. Keep the mixture moving, as the soft, starchy potatoes will begin to break down and coat the rest of your ingredients with the tomato juices, causing them to crust and start to stick together. Use a wooden or silicone spatula to keep the crust from burning on the bottom of the pan.
Once you've started to build up a nice, golden-brown crust on some of the potatoes and are getting some good flakes of it littering the pan, it's time to add your eggs. Make sure they're well beaten before adding. As soon as they're in, add your paprika and pepper, and cayenne if you're adding it (I only added a touch for zing).
Keep moving the mixture around. Don't beat it, as you don't want to turn the potatoes to total mush. Keep scraping off the bottom and sides of the pan and flipping the ingredients as best as possible, one spatulaful at a time.
Once the eggs have all firmed up and have a good, firm scrambled consistency wrapped around the other ingredients, you have yourself one piping hot mess.
I ate this as it was, from the pan, to a plate. This particular recipe did 3 servings for me, but I'm horribly greedy, so it would probably serve four, particularly with a salad.
Of all the things I've posted so far, this is the one I'm most excited to make again soon. Next time, if I'm feeling really profligate, I might add in a little bacon or pancetta (nothing meatier than that unless I happen to have some chorizo lying around - a rarity in my current state of austerity). You could add courgette as well, but you'd need to fry it down to dry it out first and prevent it from being too wet in the mixture and turning it slimy.
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