The Failed Frittata: This Cook's Story

THE RECIPE

Potato-Onion Frittata

Martha Stewart Living, February 2010

Ingredients

1 pound (about 8) small new potatoes

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 small onions (about 1 pound), thinly sliced

Coarse salt & freshly ground pepper

1 ounce sharp white cheddar cheese, grated (1/2 cup)

10 large eggs, whisked

½ cup sour cream

THIS COOK’S STORY

Dear Martha Stewart, Why do you deceive me with your trickery? When I tore this recipe from your magazine's pages, I thought….well, this doesn’t really seem too hard. Yeah, try again.

I should’ve known when I arrived at Whole Foods and began to inspect my ingredient list more closely that I was going to be in for it. Let’s begin with the ingredients I had to google. While I’d normally just call my Mom or another expert for help, I figured that I should try to really figure it all out on my own---that it would help me learn and expand my culinary horizons…again, not so much.

First up, 1 pound (about 8) small new potatoes

I had assumed these were a variety of potato (like russet, or fingerling, or whatever). A quick tour of the Whole Foods potato section told me that either A: it was not the name of a potato species or B: it was and they just didn’t have it. Since I shop based on the assumption that Whole Foods has all species of produce, I decided to go with A and google ‘new potatoes.’ Sure enough, they aren’t a species of potato, they are just baby potatoes…young potatoes as the interweb told me. Which brings me to huge problem #1: How the hell do I know how old a potato is? Is a baby potato small in size? Who knows, maybe that’s true, but I sure couldn’t tell because in each potato bin, the potatoes were all relatively the same size. Great. And since logic tells me that every species of potato can have ‘baby’ potatoes, which species was I meant to pick? This was quickly becoming a huge problem and I immediately began to feel like an idiot. I mean, really, this cannot possibly be so complicated. For a hot second I contemplated asking someone who worked in the vegetable section but I decided against actually giving voice to my stupidity---asking where the baby potatoes were just seemed impossible. I chose instead to select a smaller size species (yellow potatoes) and try to pick the smallest ones in that bin. I thought the whole 1 pound or ‘about 8’ would help me figure out if I’d made the right potato selection since if I weighed 8 of my choices and they were in the vicinity of a pound, I’d be on course. Not so much. I ended up with 5 potatoes. They weighed around a pound and were somewhat small…hopefully ‘new’. Was this the right decision? I will never know. If only potatoes could talk…

Next up on the googled ingredients list: Coarse Salt

I suspected this might be something like sea salt…since sea salt always looked bigger and ‘rougher’ to me which I figured was what they meant by ‘coarse.’ Does sea salt taste different from regular table salt? I don’t really know. Should I buy sea salt and just see what happens? I don’t know---google, wanna help me out? Oh, thank you for your insight interweb—I had no idea coarse salt was ‘coarsely ground salt’. Please god, let the labels of the salt products clearly state ‘coarse salt’ vs ‘sea salt’ or whatever else kind of salt there is. Alas, they did, proving that I didn’t really need to google this one---and probably shouldn’t have because I learned absolutely nothing. But I do have a giant container of ‘coarse salt’ at home I will surely never use up. Thanks Whole Foods, for providing any size option besides GINORMOUS when it comes to coarse salt selections.

And finally: 2 small onions (about 1 pound), thinly sliced

Dear recipe writers everywhere (including you, Martha), can you please always specify the TYPE of item? 2 small onions, what the heck? Like the great potato debacle there were also multiple species of onions in varying sizes. And again, I thought the whole poundage thing would help but for some reason this was even less helpful than in the potato situation. My instinct with onions is to just go with regular yellow onions if nothing else is specified. This would seem a safe, correct choice, except all the yellow onions were HUGE. So, what do I do? 2 of any of them weighed way more than a pound and 1 of them was never close enough to a pound (and I have to just assume that when they say pound they mean before slicing—I mean come on, I can’t even go there…they must mean that, right?). So, I decided to get 2 of the smaller of the large onions and figured I’d use one and a half of them.

At this point, I should have realized that I now had large quantitiy and volume issues with my 2 main ingredients and just cut my losses and moved on to something easier. But no, I fell under the delusional fantasy world that said, gee, since you used the scale in the produce section for the first time, you must be doing something professionally and correctly---this will all work out ok!

Now, let’s get to what in hindsight I think ended up being the true death of my frittata: my knife skills—or should I say my lack of knife skills. I’d like to preface by saying that prior to this day, I had never peeled a potato in my life (yes, I had to buy a potato peeler for this recipe and yes, I was pleasantly surprised to find out it can also be used to peel carrots and other skinned items), yet alone sliced one into thin, ¼ inch slices. While visions of thinly sliced potatoes like the ones I know to be in dishes like ‘potatoes au gratin’ danced in my head, my cutting board was a battlefield littered with the rogue remains of 5 new-ish potatoes hacked beyond recognition. Some slices were thin and looked good (I’d say maybe 3% of them), some were sliced fat and some were just chopped into shapeless, certainly, slice-less, pieces. I knew this would be a problem, but I’d come this far, so I had to move on.

The onion cutting---better than the potatoes, but by no means ‘good.’ Let’s just say, with the onions it was more of a volume issue. How much of my 2 sort of mediumish, mostly largish onions that weighed definitely more than a pound should I cut up? I just guessed.

Now that I had my cut ingrediants in front of me, I faced an even more daunting challenge---fitting them all in the pan. It was clear, that they weren’t all going to fit comfortably in there and be able cook to a ‘golden brown’…especially with the edition of 10 eggs. Which by the way---10 eggs? Really? Really Martha, 10 eggs? That seems like a lot.

Now, back to the pan issue. I knew my pan was the right size because I actually went out and bought a 10 inch pan (part of my new cooking ambitions---buying the basics) which only confirmed my earlier suspicioins: I f’d up the quantities and sizes of my onions and potatos. Oh well, let’s keep going! I’m sure it’ll turn out fine.

Ok, pan. Here’s another problem: I don’t think you are non-stick. I mean I got the really good All-Clad one specifically so it could go in the oven (my other ones definitely weren’t oven safe---two words that had never before crossed my mind). You are an excellent pan, but somehow, I don’t think the inside of you is ‘non-stick’. And while I’ll never really know for sure, what I do know is that as I continued on with the recipe my potatoes and onions did not turn golden brown and did stick messily to the bottom of the pan.

So, let’s just cut to the chase since clearly the magnitude of this frittata fail is more than apparent by now. After sloppily breaking and whisking 10 eggs (something I did not time out correctly and which involved a mini salmonella panic attack as I placed my new pepper grinder in egg goo I didn’t notice on the counter) I dumped them into the pan where I had been cooking the potatoes and onions for close to 20 minutes. Yeah, another indication I had royally f’d up being that mine not only didn’t brown, but didn’t come close to browning after I cooked them 4x as long as the recipe told me to.

Anyway, in go the eggs---this does not look pretty but I have a tiny bit of hope when they seem to actually set a little within the 2 minute time set forth in the recipe. So, I stick that puppy in the oven and hope for the best.

If the best was a sticky goopy, mess of cooked eggs and uncooked potatoes, I’d be in luck. But since its not, I settled for force feeding myself what I then decided to call a ‘potato-onion scramble.’

Oh, and thanks coarse salt...in my quest to compensate for what I think is my natural inclination to under season I completely over seasoned. So not only was I eating scrambled eggs with half cooked potatoes----it was really, really salty.

But in the spirit of hope and positivity, I have left you not with a photo of what my disaster looked like, but with the appetizing image of what Martha's looks like.

Maybe next time frittata, maybe next time.

Frittata: 1

This Cook: 0