Guest Recipe: Fritatta

Fritatta. The word that cannot be spelled. It's a great weeknight, last minute or planned ahead dinner. If you have chickens, you should have fritatta. With so many variations possible, it's hard to write or follow a hard and fast recipe, but thanks to Some Kinda Chef for the inspiration for last Friday's version:

• Locally caught wild Hog sausage
• Kale and broccoli greens from my garden
• 8 eggs from my hens
• Splash raw milk from Stryk Dairy
• Herbs from the garden 
• Salt, pepper, smoked paprika
• Habanero and cayenne, frozen and dried respectively from the garden
• Garlic
• Onions from the garden
• Cheese

Some Kinda Chef recommended sauteeing bacon with the onions and garlic then transferring to a pie dish, layering in the following ingredients on top. I prefer to use the same saute pan for the baking, so i did things a little differently:

1. Fry or sautee (whatever you want to call it) the sausage (or ham or bacon or whatever) with chopped onions, fresh herbs and garlic until the sausage is decently cooked and the onions are softening. 
2. Meanwhile, beat the eggs with milk, salt, pepper, paprika and any other spices you want. 
3. Top the meat and onions with chopped greens, reduce heat to mediumish and cover until the greens are wilted. 
4. Pour egg mixture over the greens.
5. Sprinkle the cheese on top and bake at 365ish for 25ish minutes, until eggs are puffy, cooked through and the cheese is browning.

I usually make a potato 'crust' at the bottom and so feared this dish wouldn't be that filling. Boy, howdy was i wrong! I got stuffed with less than half of this baby, and the hubby agreed: delicious!

Thanks to all my readers who submitted recipes to my call for recipes! I got some great ideas. Stay tuned for an extra special post tomorrow: i'm hosting a giveaway for a super duper product from Season's Gleanings, a card company that utilizes homegrown veggies to create beautiful artwork. As a tease, check out her blog then head back tomorrow to enter to win a set of cards!

This post is part of the Simple Lives Thursday blog hop!

Some Food Love

I recently learned some hard news to hear: a friend of mine is going through a hard time in her life. Her news hit me a little close to home, and i felt the strong need to show her a little extra love: in the form of food. I tend to think of myself as kind of curmudgeonly. I don't love humanity as a whole. I'm not overly effusive with praise or smiles or frivolous niceties. But i'm proud to know that when those close to me are hurting i step up to the plate: Extra hugs for my grandmother when she lost her husband. Increased willingness to help with chores when my mother was dealing with problems in her life.
I'm not singing praises for myself: i'm still a curmudgeon. But the least i can do is reach out with a little extra kindness to someone who has touched my own life in a positive way. I'm good at food, so I made her some muffins.

My lemon tree is not dealing with this long freeze very well, and i accidentally left all the fruit on the stem during one of our coldest nights. All the fruits froze solid! Fortunately, they still juiced fine. Unfortunately, the zest was not too keen to jump off (so i made some candied peels too, yum!). I made some DELICIOUS lemon/poppyseed bread/cake the other night with a recipe from Smitten Kitchen. I was going to turn that into muffins, but doubted my accuracy in changing the temps and times from bread to muffins. So, i adapted this recipe from Arctic Garden Studios. They turned out very moist and delicious, best eaten warm, not too sweet, and very fluffy! I added a little cornmeal for different texture, as well as poppyseeds to half the batter. I also doubled it to make 2 dozen:

Meyer Lemon Muffins
adapted from Arctic Garden Studios, adapted from Not So Humble Pie

• 2 cups all-purpose flour including about 1/2 a cup of cornmeal
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon Meyer Lemon Zest - i used all i could scrape off of 8 curmudgeonly lemons
• 1 1/4 cup homemade yogurt
• 2 freshly laid eggs
• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted (since i doubled i used 8 T butter and 2 T Coconut Oil)
• 1/4 cup  Meyer Lemon juice
• Lemon peel infused simple syrup from making candied lemon peels
• Tablespoon or 2 poppyseeds

Preheat the oven to 375°F.  Spray your tins or use fancy nonstick ones.

1. In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and lemon zest and combine thoroughly. In the center of the dry ingredients and add the yogurt, eggs, butter, and juice.
2. Mix together until the batter is combined, but don't overmix. Makes a nice, lumpy batter fizzing with activity. Add the poppyseeds last.
3. Fill muffin wells 3/4 full.
4. Bake for 18 minutes or until the muffins are light golden brown on top and a toothpick comes out clean. Don't over bake.
5. Cool in the tins for 5 minutes. Remove from pan and glaze with simple syrup.

These are way yummier warm (or frozen) with plenty of steam pouring out of their light, fluffy selves.

I can't make my friend's life less difficult. We all have our personal struggles to deal with from time to time: such is life. What i can do is give her moral support and maybe fatten her up a little bit. It's hard to feel too sad with such a bright happy taste dancing on your tongue. Make muffins out of joy and bring joy to others. I think that's a pretty good motto ;)