Minified Meals: Mushroom Asparagus Frittata

This only sounds complicated. In truth, it’s a meal you can make in 10 minutes (with cleanup) that looks and tastes like it took much longer. In addition to a big cast iron pan (the most indispensable kitchen tool ever), you’ll need:

• One bunch asparagus
• One large handful of mushrooms (I like baby bellas)
• (substitute any seasonal vegetables you prefer for the above)
• olive oil
• salt and pepper
• cayenne pepper (a generous pinch)
• 8 eggs
• Goat cheese (to taste – I use a good handful)

Yup. It’s a lot of eggs. Now, preheat your broiler on high.

In your cast iron, over medium-high heat, saute your veggies in oil for a quick minute. You want them to still be crisp/crunchy, because they’re going to cook more. Whisk your eggs and pour them in with the veggies, top with your spices, and cook until they’re just starting to firm up on the outside (about 3 minutes). Drop pinches of the goat cheese on top of the frittata and pop it into the over for another three minutes or so. It should be firmed up and golden on top, and it should smell amazing!

That’s all there is to it. Simple and lovely and perfect for when you want a filling meal in a hurry. I make it for our dinner and then we eat it the next day for breakfast or pack it in our lunch. The goat cheese and cayenne balance each other out so perfectly, and it’s almost as good cold as it is hot.

pofta buna!

Minified Meals: 10 Minute Soup

Last week, my husband had a cold. The kind of cold that leaves you lying on the couch, asking for soup. Like a good and devoted spouse, I promised to make him soup…only to realize that we were missing most of the staples. So…I improvised! Here I give you what I think was a rather inventive, decent and quick soup, made with things we had in the pantry and freezer.

Ingredients:

• 1 box Trader Joe’s vegetable broth
• 1/2 large bag frozen broccoli
• 1/2 medium bag frozen greens (collards, kale and mustard greens)
• 1 can cannelini beans
• 1 small can mushrooms
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• pepper (to taste)

It really does take ten minutes. Heat the vegetable broth to a boil on the stovetop, mixing in one cup of water. Add the frozen vegetables and let the water get hot again. Add the cannelini beans and mushrooms, and cook on medium heat for a few minutes. Add the pepper and soy sauce, and serve! It wasn’t by any means the most amazing soup I’ve ever had, but it was hearty, vegan, and a nice way to get a lot of vegetables into my diet in the dead of winter. It also made enough for dinner AND lunch the next day, for both of us. I suspect that it would also have been good with a dash of lemon juice, but we didn’t have any (nor did we have onions, carrots, celery…I wasn’t kidding when I said we’re low on soup staples up in here!)

Non-vegan addition: After eating the vegan version, I realized we had a few ounces of Trader Joe’s goat cheese in the fridge that wasn’t long for this world, so I melted it into the next bowl of soup. It was quite tasty!

This week, my husband is all recovered…and has passed his cold on to me. So I guess we can’t say that this soup staves off the winter crud – only that it makes you feel better in the midst of it! Even so, at least I wrote down the recipe so that he knows what to make me for dinner tonight!

Minified Meals: The Beginning

Dinner Day 1:

Roast portabella and zucchini pasta

Chop a large portabella mushroom and a zucchini squash into bite size pieces. Toss them in a baking dish with a teaspoon or so of olive oil  and some black pepper. Roast at 400 Fahrenheit for 20 minutes or until tasty. Meanwhile, cook some whole wheat fettucine on the stovetop and drain. Combine it all while still hot, add a tablespoon or so of parmesan and a teaspoon of butter (or don’t, as it would probably be healthier without the butter – but that is in fact how I fixed it tonight. Maybe next time I’ll try it with just the olive oil).

Prep time: 10 minutes.

Cook time: 20 minutes for the veggies.

I thought it was easy and tasty, but I love butter, cheese, and mushrooms, so this was sort of my perfect meal (Although I do hate pasta. That was a concession to my spouse, who does not appear to consider roast vegetables a stand alone meal). It met our basic dinner requirements of simple vegetarian food in a hurry, with real vegetables and minimal processed ingredients (the pasta. I don’t make it myself. I get it at Whole Foods). My husband says “I think I made too many noodles. I would have liked a sauce.” To which I said “no!” and he laughed. Only one of us is a fan of tomato based sauce, if you can’t tell.

So we ate a real dinner,the first night of the challenge – success! And since the habit changes are cumulative, I’m also continuing with October’s habit change: getting enough sleep. I was terrible during the last week of October about staying up way too late, partly for school and partly for fun. Why is it so hard to form  good habit but so easy to fall back into an old, bad one?

I think maybe the secret to habit change is blogging about it, so that everyone in my life knows that I’m doing this and gives me grief if I send an e-mail after midnight or insist on grabbing pizza for dinner. I’m back to getting enough sleep, at least! Anybody else trying to change a habit during the month of November?