Mushroom/Potato Frittata + Mushroom Melt

I've been sitting on this update for over a week now. I had the pictures ready, but I've had a lot going on lately, and sitting down to finish up the post itself never got to the top of my priority list until... well, right now.

So yeah, here we go! This is another cooking update, sort of a followup to the curry and rice post from a few weeks back. This time my Special Lady and I made a potato/shiitake mushroom frittata with portobello/broccoli melts.



Started off with chopping. Lots of chopping. Turns out I'm not half bad at it, crippling fear of cutting up my hands notwithstanding. (Though that happens enough accidentally already.)

All said, I chopped up five or six potatoes, several shiitake mushrooms, as well as spinach, parsley and basil for later.


We toss that in a big frying pan with some oil and garlic.


Next up was my least-favourite part of the process - whipping up egg whites into a froth. This took longer by hand than I expected. Would have been nice to have an electric mixer, but you know what they say about the result being more satisfying when you do it the hard way...?

That's right, it's a load of nonsense. Give me an electric mixer any day.


Meanwhile, she mixed up two full eggs with whole wheat flour, milk, baking power, sea salt and pepper.


When we were both finished each mixture, we added some spinach, parsley and basil, then I folded the egg whites into the whole eggs.

(And right now I'll admit that I had to Google-research how to fold properly beforehand, but somehow I... pulled it off!?)


The recipe called for a oven-proof skillet. But... I don't have one, so we used a casserole dish instead. (This caused a small hiccup later on.)


We evenly poured the egg mixture overtop of the potato/mushroom combo, and then covered it and let it bake in the oven.


While the frittata was baking, we started making the mushroom melts. More chopping, this time broccoli, and afterward slicing portobello mushrooms into strips.


We fried them for a while with oil and pesto.


Once the portobello and broccoli were done, we put together the sandwiches with mozzarella and put them in the oven.


Once we thought we were done, we took both out of the oven served them all up. However, this is where that little hiccup came up.

If you're at all familiar with frittatas (which apparently I was not), you'll instantly see what's wrong with them in the above picture. Frittatas are supposed to hold together, but ours didn't. I think this is because the recipe we were following called for an ovenproof skillet, and we used a larger casserole dish, so the baking time didn't get the job done. Thankfully, letting it bake a while longer solved this issue for us, but it was a decent learning experience.

Final verdict? Freaking delicious.

Hopefully there'll be another installment before too long.

Spicy Business

I'm the first to admit that cooking isn't one of my specialties. Well, aside from traditional breakfast (egg dishes with sides), those I'm pretty good at. Otherwise I've made a few decent meals in my day, and I get by fine on my own, but I'm a damn far cry from a chef in training.

Recently my Special Lady had the idea to dive into the cook books (she has a number of clean eating books and I have a great-but-barely-used vegetarian recipe book) and have a regular cooking "date night" once a week. Which is just a really great idea. I've been on the self-improvement/try-new-things bandwagon for a while now, and knowing how to cook well is kind of important, so yeah, I'm all in.

(So I didn't get to go zip-lining over the summer, but it turns out novice cooking is far more terrifying.)

We've made vegetarian lasagna rolls a few times already (and they turned out great) but I didn't think to document the process until last night, when we made vegetable curry and rice.


First up, I finally put my cool little red rice cooker back to use after letting it sit idle for some time. Worked brilliantly! Very handy.


First up, the sauce mixture. Coconut milk, curry paste -- Maybe we can try homemade next time? For now I'm walking before I run. -- and oil.

(And of course, the most important ingredient is a full glass of wine on the side.)


We added vegetables bit by bit - bamboo shoots and baby corn for starters.


Muchrooms and spinach were next. And during this process I learned the most important lesson - don't ever underestimate how much pot space you'll need. We had to upgrade to a bigger pot a few times as we added more vegetables to the mix (as you can see from the medium pot sitting in the background) which slowed down the process a bit.


And there you have it! A little naan bread on the side (and a wine refill) and we're ready to go.

Turned out well, I think! A little curry paste goes a long way, apparently - she found it to be quite spicy. I found it pretty mild, but I think that's something I inherited from my dad.

I'll probably keep documenting these for a while, so expect another post like this in a week!