Fritata as Executive Compensation

I had plans for today. Oh yes, I had plans. I was going to go to Costco and pick up some prints I had ordered online just to test the system. You see, I want to start printing some of my photos, but before I go crazy, I want to make sure I understand how to do it right. So I'll be starting with Costco, and learning how to make the prints come out the same as what I see on my monitor instead of with some crazy blue tint. Whatever.

And then I was going to go for a nice long walk. I spent this past weekend sitting. My current acupuncture teacher was in Pasadena, so I drove up to LA for the weekend and sat through classes on both Saturday and Sunday. My teacher is terrific, her information is invaluable, but by Sunday afternoon I had had it. I couldn't focus anymore. I needed the CEUs, and I knew that even in my state of diminished attention, I would still be able to latch on to a sentence here and there, and that they would be incredibly useful. So I sat for two days and felt like I had a square butt by the time I left. I really, really needed that walk today!

And then, because I had spent the weekend in Pasadena, I didn't have time to do any cleaning around the house. So I needed to do some basics - like the bathroom sink and the kitchen counters. And of course, there's always cat hair that needs to be vacuumed. But I don't want to bore you with this list - it's not why you, dear reader, have come to my blog.

So why didn't I accomplish any of this? Not one single thing on my list? Because I spent the entire day trying to figure out how to insert an image and some type into another image in Photoshop. I had my layers. I created new layers. I inserted the image in one and the type into the next. And then I flattened the layers and the image and the type disappeared. For those of you not familiar with Photoshop, this is all gobble-dee-gook, and I don't want you to even begin to try and puzzle it out. You'll miss a perfectly good day. But since I am redoing my photo website, I really need to figure this out!

There are times when I wish there was no such thing as modern technology. I waste my day in front of a machine in my little office instead of getting outside, doing some work in the garden and getting the fresh air I need. The antidote? Cooking. Yes, I have a combination stove with gas burners and an electric oven, and this, too, is technology. But that's different. It's the way I reward myself for everything else I do, be it the back breaking labor of digging up plants or hauling tree limbs in my garden, or the tedium of figuring out how to deal with the minutiae of my digital darkroom.

So sit down and join me, won't you? We're having a fritata with onions, tomatoes and roasted asparagus. Believe it or not, we have had some asparagus on sale recently! Wasn't it Mae West who said "I can resist anything but temptation"? Well, for me, asparagus is temptation. And I already had the eggs as well as some tomatoes.

1 onion, diced
1 tomato, sliced
5-6 roasted asparagus
6 eggs, beaten, using only 3 yolks. (My reduced fat version).
1 TBS Earth Balance (Or butter, if you wish).

Since I prefer my onions well cooked, I heated the pan, put the Earth Balance in and added the onions, cooking them until toasty.

Cut the asparagus into bite-sized pieces.
Add asparagus and tomatoes to the eggs.
When the onions have cooked, pour the egg mixture into the pan.

Allow to cook over medium heat until the bottom has set and there's only a little bit of runny egg on top. Place in the oven under the broiler until the top has cooked and the eggs are set.

Serve slices with crusty bread.

It's hard to stop at one slice, I know. Especially when you're seeking comfort in simplicity. Go ahead -- help yourself to another slice....

A Chicken Stew for the end of winter

To everything, there is a season. How true. But there are some things which seem to extend themselves from one season to the next. Stews are like that, I think. Mostly they are winter fare, best savored when the cold winds send you indoors. I remember those winters where I grew up on Long Island. My brother and I would play outside in the snow until our mother would drag us indoors. We'd tumble inside, pull off our boots and coats and walk into the living room. I can still feel the tingle on my cheeks as I entered a warm home, filled with the aromas of bubbling meats and vegetables. When you've been playing outside for over 2 hours, you have the feeling you could eat a horse. Fortunately, we didn't have to.

But then comes spring, and the time change. Suddenly it’s light at the end of the work day. With this lightness comes a new palette of flavors. Asparagus appears on the shelves of the grocers. Have you ever grown asparagus? We did in New Mexico. It’s amazing stuff. You need a forest of it in order to have enough to make a side dish. Each root would put out a couple of stalks. That’s it. Perhaps in other parts of the country you’d get more per root, but in New Mexico, we felt lucky if we got 3 stalks from one root. We’d walk out to the garden and head over to where the roots were buried, and there, poking up like a green telephone pole or two would be these asparagus stalks. So what do you do with 5 or 6 asparagus stalks? Well, you’d add them to a stew, of course!

I still have quite a bit of that berbere mixture I got at the Fancy Food Show. I love the color of it. Anything that fiery red must warm you from the inside. So even though I no longer need a snow suit to go out and play, and even though our rainy season seems to be at an end, I just needed to do something with the last of the asparagus I bought. And that berbere kept winking at me from the corner.

So this recipe isn’t really a recipe. It’s meant to be more of a description of how I pulled together this stew from what I had in the bins and the freezer, as well as a couple of things I bought to round it out.

To my mind, a stew begins with onions and garlic. For this dish, I had some regular yellow onions, plus I found these beauties at the Farmer’s Market. The woman told me what they were called, but I forgot. All I remember is that their Italian. (No wonder they’re so gorgeous!!) Does anyone know what they are?

Anyway, I used both kinds, thrown into a pot with some canola oil. Then came the chicken pieces, which I had rubbed generously with the berbere seasoning. When they were lightly seared on the outside, I added some chicken broth, covered the pot and let it simmer for about 15 minutes. Button mushrooms, the remains of a tomato and the asparagus went in last, and as I looked at those last three ingredients, I realized I had the colors of the Italian flag bubbling away on my stove! So what was I supposed to do? Open a bottle of Chianti Classico, of course! Salute!
p.s. I have been out of the loop for a while due to an avalanche of new patients at our clinic. This plus the necessity of doing vast amounts of paper work - which I absolutely hate and put off as long as I can - meant that I was in no mood to be writing or doing much cooking. I lived on salad, in fact. But the good news is....... (drum roll, please......) Our website is now on page one of Google! For anyone who googles "acupuncture, San Diego", we will now come up on the first page! It has taken me a little over a year to achieve this, and frankly, it just blew my mind when I saw it last nite. It makes all those nites of staying up to INSANE hours of the morning worth it. For anyone curious about what I do when I'm not in the kitchen, you can go to Mission Valley Acupuncture. Or you can just google us. ;-)