The Dinner Files

You see these a lot in Spain. For me, they took some getting used to. Slices of potato omelet as a sandwich filling? I’m all for carbs, but doesn’t that seem a bit nuts? And then I tried one and it was good. Of course, I was in a place at that exact moment, personally, that made a heavy, carb-laden, eggy concoction really hit the spot, if you know what I mean. But then I had one while waiting for a flight at the Madrid airport. I was not hung over, it wasn’t the best possible version of a tortilla sandwich (airport food is airport food the world over from what I can tell), and it was still a pretty impressive food item.

So our leftover goose egg tortilla was cut into slices, layered in lengths of baguette, and called dinner (along with a salad, as is our way).  How can room temperature potato and egg and bread be so satisfying?

I’ve returned from the Oaxacan Coast. My, is it lovely there. Hot and lovely. After this cold cold winter and so far freezing spring, the hot sun and warm ocean felt mighty good.

You know what was just as good? I ate chilaquiles every morning. Every morning. I ate tortilla chips cooked in chile sauce for breakfast every morning. Saying it now, it sounds sort of wrong. It did not, however, seem at all wrong at the time. I have a theory: Even bad chilaquiles are good. I’ve proved it true in the past. I was happily unable to prove it true again; all the chilaquiles I had were delicious. Some had the green chile and tomatillo sauce:

Some had two sauces and came with a black bean filled pastry bull with dried chile horns:

Some were ordered, some were glopped out of a hotel breakfast buffet, some were purchased at an airport lunch counter. What they all had in common was a generous drizzle of crema (slightly thin and ever-so-drizzle-able Mexican sour cream), some grated salty Oaxacan cheese, and plenty of thinly sliced raw onions on top. Duly noted.

Last night I snacked through dinner at a bar while waiting to play Edible Pursuit, the brain child of the tireless people at Edible San Francisco. People bought tickets, gathered at Acme Chophouse, formed teams, and competed for a stunning array of prizes by answering food trivia questions.

I’m going to be honest. I wanted to win. Not for the prizes either (although the 20-pound box of endive would have been nice); I wanted to win for the glory. I put together what I thought would be a team of ringers. A super smarty-pants and highly competitive Ph.D. now editor and food writer who loves trivia and two plugged-in smarty-pants writers from the San Francisco Chronicle food section.

And then we picked up another team member who showed up without a team or had a friend cancel on her – I can’t remember – and it was Jen Maiser of Life Begins at 30 (who, by the way, is a delight! and so reasonable about eating locally! we bonded over not making our own salt – that’s what the food world has come to people!). Total ringer! Filling in on the tough food politics category! How, I ask, could we lose?

I’ll tell you how we could lose: One Miss Smarty-Pants decided not to drive over an hour in the rain while sick and pregnant in order to play a trivia game in a bar (!?!? go figure !?!?) and the rest of us sat around over-thinking everything. At one point in round two we had every answer right. In our infinite wisdom we changed three of the answers to make them wrong. Smooth move Ex-Lax! We tried zenning out and following our collective gut after that but some questions during the next round required thought, not gut. Gut wasn’t going to get us anywhere with those. In fact, gut completely screwed us over on one and if we’d thought about it for 2 seconds…. Oh, never mind.

So we came in third – or fourth if you count that two teams tied for first and had to sudden-death it for the grand prize. But we had fun. We had fun despite some embarrassingly incorrect answers we marked down on paper and handed in for others to see. We missed what “blanc de blancs” means on a wine label! That one we should have thought about for just the 1 second because we all knew the answer. I think we all also felt a bit sheepish about missing what famous bakery Boulange de Cole used to be (Tassajara, obviously). But we had some proud moments too: We geeked out by demanding a fact-check on one answer and were proven correct; we worked together to remember the name of the dude whose writings are the basis of bio-dynamic farming (teammate: “I can’t believe I can’t remember his name, I wrote a whole article about him.” me: “For some reason I keep thinking of a name, but it’s not the right name. Why am I thinking of this name? I have to say the name to get it out of my head, but ignore me. Ok, so I’ll tell you who it isn’t: Rudolph Steiner. Why am I thinking of him? He’s the Waldorf guy…” teammate: “No, that right. It’s Rudolph Steiner, it’s the same guy.” me: “That’s right – what a nut.”); and one member brilliantly answered a tough fill-in question before the question was over (answer: Mac MacDonald).

I then I came home, still hungry despite the rib, the sardine, the slice of flatbread, and the spoonful of asparagus and butter beans I’d eaten four hours before, and scarfed down a few slices of the Spanish tortilla my dashing husband had made with this recipe I’d given him:

Spanish Tortilla

Like the Mexican tortilla only in general shape (round and somewhat flat) and in its ubiquitous presence, Spanish tortillas are more like omelets (known as “French tortillas” in Spanish), and come with as many varieties. I add a bit of garlic instead of the traditional onion, but otherwise stick to the basics of egg and potatoes. As flexible at home as they are in Spain, where slices are available at almost every café or bar anytime of day, tortillas are delicious hot, warm, or cold for breakfast, brunch, lunch, cocktails, or dinner.

2 cups olive oil (most will be discarded)
4 to 5 Yukon Gold or other medium-sized potatoes
1 Tablespoon salt
3-4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 cup chopped parsley, optional
4 whole eggs and 4 egg whites

Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat.  Add the sliced potatoes and salt.  Cook, stirring often to keep the potatoes from sticking, until edges of potatoes look cooked (they will be less opaque than the centers).  Add the chopped garlic and continue cooking and stirring often over medium heat until the potatoes are cooked through.  When potatoes are cooked, add chopped parsley, stir into the potatoes and remove from heat.  Drain the entire mixture in a colander or strainer and let sit for 5 minutes.  The potatoes may be a bit mushy and fall apart, this is okay.

Beat the eggs and the egg whites in a large bowl.  Add the potatoes-garlic mixture and mix well.

Heat a 10-inch skillet over medium heat (a non-stick skillet will work best when you need to turn it out at the end).  Spray or coat the pan with olive oil.  Add the potato-egg mixture and flatten into the pan with a spatula or spoon.  Turn heat down to low and let cook until the edges are firm and just the very top layer barely moves when the pan is gently shaken.

When just a top layer of uncooked egg remains, put skillet under the broiler to brown the top.

When the top is brown, remove from oven.  Run a spatula around the edges to loosen the tortilla.  Place a plate larger than the pan over the pan and turn the tortilla out onto the plate.

Serve warm, room temperature, or cold.  Serve plain or with almost any condiment you can think of (hot sauce, pesto, salsa, ketchup–anything that you like with your eggs). It really is the perfect midnight snack for a hard-working, trivial gal.

As regular readers know, I live in San Francisco. As very regular readers know, I am in Minnesota for a few weeks. I’m at my family’s cabin on a lake in Northern Minnesota. This afternoon I stopped by the market in a nearby town before picking up Ernie from day camp. I was not surprised there were no fresh jalapeños to be found, nor that there was no tofu, and I guess, when I thought about it, I wasn’t surprised by this either:

But I thought you might be. Yes, you’re seeing right. That’s two kinds of 100% Minnesota-grown wild rice and canned cooked wild rice. This at a small market in a small town.

I did not partake. We had chicken and cheese quesadillas with a remarkably un-spicy avocado and tomato salad.

This was sweet. Sweet as the taste and sweet as slang for something good. So I topped it with with some chopped roasted jalapenos. Magic. If you have a lot of corn sitting around (the farm box this week was bursting with the stuff) and no aversion to getting corn juice sprayed all over your face and hair, cook up this Sweet Corn Soup–we had it chilled because it was actually hot in San Francisco yesterday (the wind took care of that today), but I tasted it when it was still hot and it was goooood that way too.

We also tucked into a Spanish tortilla, a thick potato+onion omelet that seems to be the backbone of the Spanish diet from my limited experience. I love them. Love them! I even have a tortilla plate–a wooden plate with a handle on the bottom so you can use it to cover the pan in which you’ve cooked the tortilla, flip the whole thing to turn the tortilla out onto the plate and then the handle becomes a little stand so you can sort of display your creation. They’re good hot, warm, or cold. They work as a snack, dinner, lunch, breakfast, and sliced in a sandwich (not kidding!). We had ours with dollops of brilliant green pesto (leftover from the night before) which was a vibrant alternative to the more traditional aïoli-type sauce.

Potato Onion Tortilla

2 cups olive oil (don’t worry, you drain most of it)

2 lbs. potatoes (I like Yukon Golds for this), peeled and cut into even 1/4-inch slices

1/2 tsp. salt

1 onion, halved and sliced (optional)

4 – 6 cloves garlic, finely chopped (optional)

8 eggs (or 6 whole eggs and 4 whites or some similar combination if you want to lighten it up a bit)

1. In a large pot, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add potatoes and salt. Cook, stirring a few times, for about 5 minutes. Add onion and garlic. Cook, again stirring as the mood strikes you, until potatoes are very soft and onion is tender, about 5 more minutes. Lower heat as needed to keep mixture from browning.
2. Meanwhile, beat eggs until whites are thoroughly broken up.
3. Put a colander over a large bowl and drain potato mixture. Reserve oil for another use, if you like.
4. Add potato mixture to eggs, stirring (it’s okay if the eggs start to cook a bit).
5. Heat a 10- to 12-inch oven-proof frying pan over medium high heat, add 2 tsp. of the reserved oil. Swirl around pan. Add egg-potato mixture. Reduce heat to low. Cook undisturbed until almost completely set (except on top). Put under a broiler for a few minutes to set top (this is cheating and inauthentic–so shoot me).
6. Place a large plate or tortilla stand over the frying pan. Being careful to hold everything together but also not burn yourself, turn pan upside down to turn tortilla onto plate. Cut into wedges and serve.

One thing I do sometimes is add a handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley to the potato mixture just before draining it. That makes a very pretty tortilla, though I do say so myself.