Monday, April 20, 2015

A Spring Vegetable Frittata for Mother

It always feels a little wrong making a frittata with freshly cooked vegetables, since the whole point of the dish is to use up leftovers, but seeing as we’re branding this as a Mother’s Day brunch special, we’ll make an exception.

If you want to play it safe, you can cook each vegetable separately, but that takes longer than the one-after-the-other method shown here. Like I said in the video, this is a great practice recipe for new cooks, since you really have to pay attention to what’s happening in the pan. I said to use medium heat, but you may want to adjust that up and down, depending on what you see happening.

Make sure all your vegetables are tender, hot, and well seasoned before adding your eggs, and not a lot can go wrong. Once those, and hopefully some cheese, get stirred in, turn off the heat, and pop the pan into the oven until the eggs are set. If your mom likes golden-brown, you can use the optional broiling step seen herein.

If you decide to garnish with edible flowers, make sure you’re actually using edible flowers. Nothing puts a damper on a Mother’s Day brunch like a trip to the emergency room. If you use nasturtium you’ll be safe, otherwise, do some research. I really hope you give this delicious vegetable frittata a try soon. Enjoy!


Makes 6 large portions:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 leek, chopped
1 jalapeno, seeded, diced
1 1/2 cups sliced asparagus
1 1/2 cups sliced zucchini
handful baby spinach
1 1/2 cups sliced cooked potatoes
12 large eggs
1 tsp salt, plus more as needed to taste while cooking veggies
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
pinch cayenne
4 ounces goat milk feta, or your favorite cheese
350 F. for about 15 minutes, or until just set, then broil on high for 1-2 minutes for some color

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Chef John....you ROCK!! Thank you for being you! ;-)

Unknown said...

Thank you for the comment about giving birth! Sooooo thank you!

Aaron said...

This looks amazing and I do intend to make one soon.

However, the moms in my life may not ever allow me to stray from our tradition of having your Monte Cristo Eggs Benedict!

Unknown said...

Chef John, I had read somewhere that you shouldn't salt your eggs until they've started to set. Something about the salt breaking down the eggs. Have you ever heard of that, or is that only applicable to certain things?

Unknown said...

Thank you Chef! I made this today for Mothers Day.

Trimgod said...

I tried this this morning with chef John’s real mashed potatoes. We didn’t have any whole potatoes handy or cooked potatoes either. So I thawed some of the mashed potatoes I had, put them in a cast iron skillet on med/low and crisped them up a bit. It worked really well. So I really do hope you give this a try, and as always...