Spanish Frittata - An Easy Recipe on a Budget

Not too long ago, I put out a request on Facebook for favourite vegetarian and vegan meal ideas.  We're hoping that by eating more vegetable-based meals, we'll cut down on our ecological footprint, eat more healthfully, and save money on groceries.  I got lots of responses, and many of them pointed me to blogs and websites that I need to take a few minutes to peruse some time, and I look forward to it.  But what I was really hoping for was for a few specific recipes that friends and family make on a regular basis and really like.  This recipe was just one such meal idea, given to me by my friend Joanne (thank you Joanne!) and it was easy, fast, inexpensive, filling, tasty, and, now, a keeper for our family.  It also gave me a chance to try out my new cast iron frying pan that my parents brought back to me from their spring trip in Florida.  I love that pan (ok the idea of that pan!), but haven't really tried using it very much just yet--I'm a little scared of it, to be honest.  But it worked beautifully for this recipe and gave me a lot more confidence to try other recipes in it!

Spanish Frittata

2 cups peeled, cubed potatoes (I didn't quite have two cups, as I just had two potatoes left!)
1 onion, diced
5-6 farm fresh eggs
2 tbsp water
salt and pepper to taste
salsa
grated Cheddar (or your favourite) cheese

Cook the potatoes and onions in olive oil in an oven-proof skillet on medium heat until potatoes are fork tender and lightly browned.  In a large glass measuring cup, beat eggs and water with a fork; add salt and pepper to taste.  When potatoes and onions are ready, pour egg mixture evenly into skillet.  Turn heat down to medium-low and cover, cooking until eggs are set.  When eggs are ready, place two or three spoonfuls of salsa on top and spread evenly over surface of eggs to create a thin layer.  Sprinkle with grated cheese.  Place pan under broiler in oven and broil, watching carefully, until the cheese reaches your desired level of meltiness-brown-deliciousness.  Take out (carefully with oven mitts!) and allow to cool for a couple of minutes, then slice into wedges like pizza and serve.

I spooned sour cream onto mine, topped it with snipped fresh chives, and served with whole wheat rolls, tomato slices, and steamed swiss chard.  And yes, I realize that swiss chard isn't really the most appropriate side (perhaps sliced avocado may have belonged a little more on that plate?) but I had picked it fresh from my garden this afternoon, I was excited about it, and I wanted to eat it. :)  Joanne suggested serving it with a salad, and the next time I have enough greens on hand to make a salad, I'll give it a try.

This is super easy and really tasty.  You can make it with local ingredients picked up at the farmers market, and it is easy on the budget.  Give it a try soon!

Potatoes and onion--mostly  just showing off my super new frying pan!

I used six eggs, and they were pretty big.  We had loads to feed our small family.

I really have a penchant for the action shots.  In goes the egg mixture!

The eggs are set now, after cooking, covered, for about 10 minutes or so.  If you're not sure, jiggle the pan.  The eggs should stay put!  Then, if you're really not sure, touch it in the middle.  It should feel firm.

I spread about 3 spoonfuls of fresh salsa (not homemade, I admit) over the top of the frittata.

A good sprinkle of cheddar makes it super yummy!

Here it is, fresh out of the oven.

Topped with sour cream, chives from the garden, locally hothouse grown tomato, and my very first harvest of swiss chard.  And... it didn't stick to the pan!  Woohoo!  It came out beautifully. :)

This post is shared with Homestead Barn Hop #66 at Homestead Revival.

Corn Chowder--Not Just For Your Grandmother

When I was a child, we didn't really eat corn chowder.  Probably because my mom thought we wouldn't like it (and to be honest, it wouldn't have been my favourite soup-like option).  I remember eating it at my grandparents' though, and while I dutifully ate my whole bowl, I remember my younger cousin from Ontario loving it.  I can still picture her with her little blonde head, sitting at the card table that was set up in the kitchen for the kids to eat at, happily consuming a big bowl of it while we wondered whether or not we liked it.

I love corn chowder now though, and with corn on sale last week at Sobeys, I made a batch with our leftovers.  I based the recipe on this one, but made a few changes to it to suit our tastes a little better!

Corn Chowder


2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp (or so) summer savoury (the original recipe calls for thyme leaves from 6 sprigs)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
6 cups vegetable stock, or chicken stock (I used both)
2 cups whole milk
2 potatoes, diced
Kernels from 6 ears of corn
6-8 slices bacon, fried till crisp and crumbled
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (I used marble)
salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley or a tbsp or so dried

Heat the butter and olive oil in a soup pot over medium heat.  Add the onion, garlic, and summer savoury and cook until the veggies are nice and soft, about 8-10 minutes.  Add the flour and stir well.  Pour in the stock and bring to a boil, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and taking care to prevent lumps from forming.  Add potatoes and boil hard for 8 minutes or so, until the potatoes are soft and start to break down.  Add the corn kernels and milk (mine were already cooked, you could put them in earlier if you were cutting them off raw cobs), and simmer a little longer (try not to return to a boil as you don't want your milk to separate). Before serving, stir in the cheese, bacon bits, parsley, salt and pepper, and a little drizzle of olive oil.  Ladle into bowls and serve with some crusty bread.

To Meal Plan or Not To Meal Plan

Trying to figure out what to make for supper each evening actually keeps me lying awake in bed at night.  Really.  I lie there, thinking about what Craig will like, what we have already eaten recently, as he is a real stickler for not repeating meals too closely in succession, what Susannah will eat, and what our picky, stubborn, unwilling-to-try-anything-new-or-green James will possibly consume.  Flashes of what I have in the fridge and pantry and what various combinations they can work together to become dance in a whirlwind through my mind, and it takes me a while to figure it out.  This is why I really need to meal plan, and I like planning my meals.

When I recently read this post at Frugally Sustainable (a great blog!), it made me wonder about what exactly people do when they plan meals.  Her three reasons against meal planning included (1) it costs more, (2) more food is wasted, and (3) the inflexible nature of the meal planning can be stressful.  Her point was that rather than planning meals, we should keep stocked pantries and use what we have on hand for meal preparation.  I liked the post but it really made me blink; none of those points seemed to gel with my experience of meal planning at all, but it seemed to really resonate with other readers.  So I think I need to clarify why, while I agree with the pantry stocking, I disagree with the meal planning points.

1) It doesn't cost more.  Well, it shouldn't.  If you are randomly picking out fancy recipe ideas from within the pages of the newest Martha Stewart Living, and they require lemongrass and tandoori masala and cardamom pods and those three ingredients don't happen to be in your pantry at the precise moment (actually I have everything but the lemongrass so obviously my imagination isn't very far-reaching tonight!), then you're going to go out and spend more on groceries than if you were just buying your regular basics.  But that is not how I do things.  Instead, I:

• pore over the flyers and write down the best deals on everything from meat to pasta to celery to cheese from all the local grocery stores
• assess what I have in my pantry and fridge, which includes things I bought multiples of the last time they were on a good sale (such as whole wheat pastas, seeds, canned salmon, carrots,  onions, cheddar, etc.) and what I bought in bulk the last time we were at CostCo (e.g. 10 kg bags of flour, 6-pack cases of passata, 1 L jugs of maple syrup, 1 kg bags of nuts, dried herbs, etc.)
• sit down and figure out what I can make from a combination of what I already have on hand and what is on sale. I try very hard not to buy things that aren't on sale.  And then I write out a tentative schedule of suppers for the next 7-10 days, based on what I came up with from these options.  The end result?  Our grocery bill goes way down.

2) Waste?  What waste?  OK, not absolutely everything that I prepare gets eaten to the last morsel with plates licked clean.  Just check under the high chair after supper is over.  But honestly, we really don't waste much food anymore.  If I make meals like casseroles or things that don't freeze well, Craig takes the majority of our leftovers to work for his lunch.  If I make a meal that does freeze well, then I try to make two (or more) meals at the same time, and eat one, and freeze the other.  That way, if we don't feel like having spaghetti again tomorrow, we have another quick-to-prepare meal waiting in the freezer.  Freezer stocking isn't just for pre-natal planning, you know!  Additionally, I try to turn whatever we had into something else.  Here is an example:

Tuesday, April 17th:  Rosalyn cooks a 3 1/2 pound chicken (about $6.57) in the slow cooker.  We have chicken dinner that night (with extra gravy thawed from the freezer where it was stored after a previous chicken dinner).

Note: this is not my photo, but my chicken DID look like this!

Wednesday, April 18th: Rosalyn (who put the bones, skin, and less choice bits back in the slow cooker with veggies and water and delicious herbs to simmer for 12 hours overnight to make a great chicken stock) makes homemade chicken soup for supper, served with toasted slices of homemade bread and pieces of cheddar.  Not fancy, but yummy.  It made enough to serve all of us one supper, put another supper's worth of soup in the freezer, and two small individual lunch-sized containers, one in the freezer and one in the fridge, for Craig to take to work the next day.  So two family suppers, and two one-person lunches.

Here's Craig's lunch.  OK, you can't really see the soup very well, but I took it after I made it because I wasn't planning on writing about this!

Thursday, April 19th: Rosalyn uses the very last of the cut up chicken meat to make quesadillas, served with Mexican rice on the side.  Side note: quesadilla technique needs work.  However, it was another quick, easy meal made with leftovers, and there were plenty of quesadillas so Craig took the last two "wedges" as an accompaniment to his lunch the next day.

Quesadilla and Mexican rice with sour cream, forgive the less than photogenic serving.

So first of all, I stretched a 3 1/2 pound chicken to cover four supper meals, plus a couple of lunches for Craig.  Obviously, it can go that far when the children are still very little and eat negligible amounts of it at this point, but still.  It's not impossible that a larger family (or one with larger children) couldn't make a larger chicken go just as far.  Second, not once, in the planning or preparation of those three meals did I have to run to the store to buy anything.  I used things in my pantry and fridge.  None of the chicken was wasted, and nothing extra needed to be purchased.  Expensive?  No.  Wasteful?  No.

3) Stressful? Not for me!  So this will totally depend on your personality.  I have always been a planner, so of course planning doesn't cause me any undue stress.  But even if that's not really your personality, if you are juggling children, housework, cooking, gardening, dog-walking, working outside the home, grocery shopping, studying, library-book returning, or any combination of various and sundry tasks, then I don't really think it matters if you are the strictest, most obsessive planner on the planet or a free-spirited whimsical fairy of spontaneity.  Meal planning will help you survive. 

You are not carving the meals in stone, like the ten commandments.  No one is going to criticize you if you switch Sunday and Thursday meals because you decided to do some shopping, or drive to the beach, or relax on the sofa with a chai latte while the house imploded around you.  I would wager that, if your household is anything like mine, no one even knows what you planned for the week's meals, if they know you meal plan at all.  It is one of those little details they don't have to worry about, because you take on that agony joyful task with a light heart and unbridled enthusiasm for the good of your family.  It's still flexible.  You can look at the list and mentally change the places of things.  What it gives you is the peace of mind that you know what you have in the house, you know what you're going to do with it, and you don't have to come up with anything at the last minute while your fourteen-month-old screams at you from her high chair because the potatoes haven't boiled yet.  In the case of the chicken, yes, I did plan ahead and I did stick to the schedule, because I didn't want to freeze any (this time.  Last time, I froze extras and then later mixed them, and broccoli, in with homemade mac and cheese. Yum.).  If you decide you don't want to deal with the leftovers now, freeze them!  You'll be glad later that you did.

The verdict?

So yes, by all means keep your pantry stocked with items that go on sale that you know that you will use (don't stock it with 59 cent cases of canned mushrooms when nobody in your family will eat them).  A stocked pantry means you have most of what you need, when you need it.  Flyer shopping will help you get the best deals and cut down on your grocery bills.  And meal planning will keep you sane, and save you money at the same time.

Do You Know This Herb?

Summer Savoury, Satureja hortensis

In Atlantic Canada, I think we take for granted that summer savoury is the obvious choice when it comes to making poultry dishes, particularly stuffing for chicken and turkey.  I didn't really realize until a couple of years ago when my sister bought me the Pioneer Woman cookbook and I took a look at some of her recipes, namely her chicken pot pie, and other recipes elsewhere on the internet, that most people use sage or thyme generally to cook these dishes.  I noticed this particularly in recipes coming from the United States.  And it made me a little sad.  I thought, "does this mean they don't know about summer savoury?"

Summer savoury is an annual herb with a short growing season, which definitely suits our Maritime climate.  It has tubular lilac-coloured flowers that bloom from July until September, and has elongated leaves.  The plant itself grows to be about 18 inches high.  It is a great companion plant, apparently, for onions and beans.  I personally haven't grown it because it's produced locally and is widely available, although I have seen it for sale in local garden centres and this year I think I will plant some so I can try using it fresh more often.

What makes it so special, though, is its flavour.  It's reported to be pungent, spicy, fragrant, sweet... what do I call it?  Delicious.  Summer savoury tastes like Thanksgiving and Christmas, like family gathered together for special occasions.  It tastes like your mother's homemade chicken soup when you're not feeling well and need a little extra love, like warmth in the winter and comfort and home.

While most of us are familiar with its use in poultry dressings, I use it in pot roast, chicken soup, chicken salad, pork dishes, and vegan tomato/white bean/brown rice soup (an awesome recipe my sister introduced to me, which I may post on the blog some day soon).  I use it in any recipe that calls for thyme or sage, because I enjoy it so much more.

When I lived in Italy, I fell absolutely head over heels for fresh basil, and I succumbed to the seduction of fresh rosemary as well.  But a little packet of Montgomery's dried summer savoury cannot be pushed out of my heart by those bold and beautiful flavours of the Old World that easily.  An herb with a lot of heart, that will always fill my senses with memories of home.

Try it.  You might find a wonderful new culinary friend.

This post is linked up to the Living Well Blog Hop #32 at Common Sense Home, Wildcrafting Wednesdays #30 at Mind Body and Sole and Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways at Frugally Sustainable.