Mushroom Frittata

Posted by Meg: Today, we decided to make a frittata. This was our third attempt and we are still trying to master it. The recipe was from the latest edition of Cooking Light - a Mushroom Frittata. Let me start by saying that if you throw wild mushrooms, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, fresh thyme and fresh eggs together, it's hard to go wrong unless you overcook things. But the devil is in the details. First, cook the mushrooms.

A quick aside: we saw "Julie and Julia" last week and the concept of "don't crowd the mushrooms" was reinforced. I always crowd the mushrooms. They reduce to a fraction of their original size so I figured you might as well pack as many as you can into a frying pan. Wrong approach, according to Julia and she makes sense. If you put too many in the pan, "their juices escape and they do not brown". So this time, I gave the mushrooms much more space although probably not enough. The frittata recipe suggested an 8-inch ovenproof pan and since we had a 6" and a 9" caphalon pan, we went with the 9".

The recipe said to coat the pan with cooking spray but, since we are recently so influenced by Julie Child, we went with butter. Bottom line, the frittata was delicious but a bit thin. Should have used a smaller pan. Also, part of the frittata stuck to the pan. I don't know if the outcome would have been different with cooking spray.


A footnote: we subscribe to Cooking Light for a reason. Great recipes, great flavor, less fat and bad stuff in our diet. But Tyler and I are both pretty frugal. The frittata recipe called for 3 egg whites. What to do with the yolks? Fry them up and eat them along side the frittata! I'm a little embarrassed by that. But last time I had to use egg whites and not yolks, the yolks languished in my refrigerator for a couple of weeks before I tossed them. But isn't that better than eating them? Tyler would not agree with me on that.