Weekend lunch

This is shaping up to be one heck of a late-summer weekend. After putting up with the shoddy weather earlier in the week (think horizontal rain), the air breezeth and the sun shineth and all is well that ends well. My friend E recently moved into the apartment, and I have enjoyed reuniting with him the past few days. Today is his birthday, so I whipped up a simple celebratory lunch, a prelude to the highly anticipated Afghan food that is on the menu for tonight. Realizing I had all the ingredients on hand to actually “whip” the meal up was quite satisfying, because I often wonder whether I shop for food economically — that is, not on a meal-by-meal basis. All I needed to purchase was a lime and some pita bread. I think I haven’t yet found what ingredients are really staple to me.

We dined outside on our backdoor patio, my second time in two weeks after not having used it at all for the previous ten months.  I made an arugula and sausage frittata, some guacamole, and pita chips.

La spread

Dinner with leftovers: spinach and goat cheese frittata

You can’t really go wrong with frittatas. They can be eaten any time of the day, at any temperature, anywhere (tableside, at a picnic, grabbed on the go). They can be made in under 20 minutes, making them ideal for a quick but substantial snack or mid-week meal. They’re invaluable for emptying your fridge and making use of unloved, wilting, on the brink of being trashed vegetables. A kitchen sink kind of frittata is not hard to imagine and, with the right amount of seasoning, would be amply satisfying. Though they may be brethren, omelets and scrambled eggs are nowhere near as versatile.  Or pretty.

Sunday brunch for two

In my excitement to get cracking on all those newly picked apples, I invited J over for Sunday brunch, most cleverly killing two birds with one stone in the process, the birds being catching up with a mate and using up some apples. While I considered making it an exclusively sweet brunch menu consisting of nothing but a motherload of apple crisp, I ended up throwing together a frittata at the last moment as well – a good move, as I discovered J is fond of eggs. I ran into a slight problem over what to put in the frittata, as I found little more than sweet potatoes, yogurt, gochujang, shredded parmesan, and prepared spicy korean fish cakes (from H Mart, which might be my new favorite place on this sweet earth) in the fridge. I briefly contemplated putting sweet potatoes and then the fish cakes in (not together!), but decided to keep it simple, making a parmesan frittata with some dried herbs, finished with freshly ground black pepper (recipe at the end).