Let’s talk about Frittata. Specifically, let’s talk about what it all too quickly has turned into in my past, something my mother likes to call ‘egg rag’. Egg rag is sometimes not quite an omelet, sometimes not quite scrambled eggs and very, very occasionally, not quite pancakes. I have perpetrated egg rag on the world many times, as have most of us I suspect. I have, like you, spent time poking ineffectually at egg that has somehow bonded on a molecular level with the pan before giving up, scraping the thimbleful I can actually get to move out, dumping a chopped up sausage on top, serving it in a cupcake case and calling it Tapas.
(Somewhere in the UK, a Tapas restaurant chef is on the phone, this article on his screen. A voice picks up at the other end and the chef hisses ‘HE KNOWS.’)
Anyway! Frittata’s crap because it always turns into egg rag for me and I’m, by and large, done with subjecting my face to that sort of disappointment. We deserve freedom, my friends! Freedom from the oppression of failed egg dishes! Freedom from the polite lies we tell ourselves that sometimes raw yolk will make us feel a bit like Rocky! Freedom from the cupcake case of oppression and the chopped sausage of failure! I give you!
Jamie’s Summer Vegetable Frittata
(With stuff)
We lug in his name.
Victor! The usual suspects!
So what we have here is;
Eggs. 8 of them. These are important.
Courgettes. 2 of them. Also important.
Left over Roast Chicken. Which I’m not sure I should capitalize.
Left over Mushrooms. Which I definitely shouldn’t capitalize.
Some Caynenne pepper.
A gem lettuce
2 tomatoes
These are not in the Frittata but rather, next to it. Think of them like the two chaps in the boat in The Great Escape. The salad they became was dull and unnecessary, but competent for all that and we should be glad they got past the Germans unnoticed. Or something.
Anyway, the first thing we need for this is TOOLS. Or rather a tool. Or rather, a spinning wheel of death. Observe!
This is the Grateotron 5000. That is its name now.
This is the Grateotron 5000 in its native habitat, at the top of the lovely food processor my parents very kindly bought us to enable my cooking habit.
This is what it does.
Seriously, I just had to pop the courgette in the Grateotron 5000’s grating chute and it ate It and turned it into this! Now, St Jamie recommends squeezing the courgette to get the excess moisture but I didn’t do this because;
A)It didn’t seem entirely damp
and
B)I’m still giggling about having to pound the chicken last time.
So instead, I added this, the mushrooms and the chicken to a hot iron skillet misted with olive oil and shoved them around it whilst they heated. So fast, as you can see, that motion blur occurred.
At the same time…well, not at the same time that would be weird. I stopped doing this then I cracked the eggs into a bowl, whisked the Cayenne in so they looked like this;
And then added them to the pan. I stirred them around until they’d covered everything else and then…I discovered the secret to Frittata.
The Iron skillet.
All I did was put the skillet in a pre-heated oven (200 degrees) after shredding some goat’s cheese on top and left it for fifteen minutes. When it came out, it looked like this;
THAT is not egg rag, my friends, that is egg couture! Only you can eat it and…it just looks…it looks better than any I’ve previously attempted and it tasted utterly amazing. Plus, because the pan was misted all we had to do was slide the spatula around the edge and it lifted out like a large enthusiastic pancake. Egg rag no more! The age of the Frittata has dawned!
What I learned:
-I shouldn’t capitalize most ingredients.
-The Iron Skillet doesn’t just sound like an obscure fighting style, it’s also the secret to a great Frittata.
-I need to make more creative salads.