Frittata

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a dead end, cooking-wise. No inspiration, no ideas, nothing.

So I dug out my old "things to cook in 20xx" lists and looked through them, to see if there was anything there that might loosen the blockage.

Of course I could have opted for the Ye Olde Recipe Collection, but that would have meant having to go out and buy ingredients and I have become a bit house bound of late as well. The rain has of course contributed to this.

So, frittata was on the cards. Sadly, I had only listed it, without any accompanying research and appropriate recipe links. So I googled the term and looked up the 3 - 4 links that came up on top. Pretty pictures, I must say, very mouth-watering. But once I started reading, I began to realise that it is not as simple as I had thought.

I opted to pick out bits and bobs from different recipes and of course this massively affected the end result. Besides, I wanted to use some of that smoked paprika I bought some time ago.

I already had some boiled potatoes, so I just sliced them. Probably about 300 g.
I then fished out the last onion that was hiding at the back of the veg drawer in the fridge (what was it doing there?!?) and sliced it in what I thought would look pretty.

I then heated up a little oil and put the onion in to soften a bit.

In the mean time, I whisked together 5 eggs + a left-over egg white with a little salt, pepper, smoked paprika and chopped parsley.

I then tried to stir in the potato slices without breaking them up too much and when the onions were ready, I did the same with them without much success.

So I put the pan back on the hob and poured out the whole lot. As expected the potatoes and onions were too big and sort of stuck up from the pan, while the egg kept to the very bottom of it.

I tried to fold up the edges over the middle to give it a nicer shape, but that didn't work either, instead the omelette just broke up, so I gave up and stirred around to make sure everything raw got cooked and everything cold got warmed through.



Not appetising one bit. So to be on the safe side, I fried up some good old Swedish meatballs and sliced some roast pepper for garnish.



This would have worked a treat, if I hadn't been overly careful with the seasoning of my "frittata".

I don't know what's gotten into me, but I seem less able than normal to add a sufficient amount of salt in my food lately. I've always been careful with that, but what I'm doing now is ridiculous.

I'm not sure I will want to try this out again, at least not any time soon, even if I like frittata.

Aioli

We (my parents, Bip and I) first made our acquaintance with aioli in Spain (and there they call it alioli). This is many, many years ago and a few years back, my Mum worked out how to make it and would always make loads and it would run out really fast.

Well, finally I've got round to making this myself, it's a lot easier than you might think. OK, so I used technology - the blender attachment on my trusty Kitchen Assistent.

I also had a couple of elephant garlics from a visit to this year's Chili Fiesta at West Dean. It's from the stand of The Garlic Farm and it's the first time I've seen these in real life - They are massive - think grapefruit size and each had "only" five cloves, but each was the size of a golf ball. They said the elephant garlic is milder flavoured and that it was ideal for roasting. I planted the cloves from one of the bulbs and used 2/3 of a clove to make aioli. That seemed to be about 2-3 regular cloves of garlic.

Ingredients

2-3 cloves of garlic
1 medium egg
about 400 ml grapeseed oil
2-3 tbsp water (if needed)
1 tbsp lemon juice
salt to taste

Method

1. Peel and cut the garlic in chunks and place in a blender, along with the egg and some salt.


2. Blend on high and slowly start pouring the grapeseed oil.


3. If it gets too thick, add water a tbsp at a time.


4. Depending on how strong garlic flavour you want, you can stop blending before the 400 ml oil has been added, or you can keep adding more.


5. At the end, add the lemon juice and more salt if needed.

I served these with the wonderful bread sticks from my Dough book by Richard Bertinet. I made two types from the dough batch recipe - one with sesame seeds and one with poppy seeds. I didn't follow the instructions of folding in three, but only folded in two. I got about 20 sticks out of that and they worked ever so well for dipping. I also made hummus and had some of the now very spicy olive oil from the pickled roasted chillies. I also put some olive oil, but that didn't quite compete with the other dips.

Hottest tip from my Mum - do not use olive oil! It goes solid in the fridge and can cause the aioli to separate and go funny.

And sorry no photos, things disappeared way too quickly for that.

Enhanced Gazpacho

Last week Lundulph and I visited some god friends that we'd not seen for a long time and we had Gazpacho from New Covent Garden. It was very tasty and had noting to do with what Lundulph had concocted at primary school and certainly not related to the stuff I bought in Spain many years ago that came in a carton as well. This tasted more like Bularian tomato sauce without the potatoes.



But they only had one packet left at the supermarket, so I decided to enhance it with the baby courgettes and beautiful French beans I picked last Sunday. The Pick Your Own farm has become quite an addiction.

I didn't measure things sadly. I cut the courgettes with my alligator cutter into match sticks and fried them in quite a lot of ground nut oil. When they were well browned, I poured out as much as I could, then poured the soup over them and put back on the hop to heat through. I added about a tea spoon of hot crushed chillies, a tea spoon of dill and a tea spoon of thyme and stirred through. In the mean time I steamed the French beans. To be on the safe side, I topped with a table spoon of crème fraîche and crispy bacon.

Pretty quick and very tasty. Pity I only had one pack of the soup. In the future it would be nice to work out a good recipe for gazpacho though.