Asparagus Frittata

Memorial Day is the traditional segue to summer. And in the Great Lakes, it’s the start of weekend gatherings–at home, at the cottage, and at the campsite. What’s a quick and easy way to enjoy breakfast together? A simple frittata with seasonal vegetables. And right now, it’s asparagus season.

Most people in Michigan can’t wait for the first asparagus to show up at farmers markets and roadside stands. I’m one of them. As soon as the Holland Farmers Market opened in May, I was there with my basket, loading up on this spring vegetable that can be prepared so many ways. Putting it in a frittata is one of my favorites. In addition to the asparagus, I buy the rest of the ingredients from our local farmers at the Holland Farmers Market: pastured eggs from Grassfields, red onions from Visser Farms, and goat cheese from Country Winds Creamery. (Another reason why I love this recipe? You can cook it over a campfire, too!)

Asparagus Frittata

Serves 4.

3 T. olive oil

1/2 medium red onion, thinly sliced

1/2 lb. fresh asparagus, trimmed and chopped into 1-inch pieces

8 eggs, beaten

Salt and pepper to taste

1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese, 1/4 cup Pecorino cheese,  or dollops of goat cheese

Optional: chopped fresh herbs such as rosemary, thyme, tarragon, or parsley

Put 1 tablespoon of olive oil and vegetables into a large oven-proof skillet. Saute onions with asparagus on medium heat until nearly tender, about three minutes. With a slotted spoon, remove vegetables from pan. (Note: You can also leave the veggies in and pour the eggs right over them but I remove them and do the next steps first so the frittata doesn’t stick to the pan.)

Add salt and pepper to eggs, then stir. (If using herbs, add them now.) Heat remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil in skillet on medium-high heat until bubbly. When oil is very hot, pour egg mixture into pan. As edges cook, lift up with a spatula and tilt pan so uncooked egg mixture runs underneath. Continue until eggs are no longer runny. (It will still be slightly soft.)

Preheat broiler on high. Spoon vegetables evenly over egg. Sprinkle cheese or place dollops over entire pan. Put pan in oven under broiler flame and immediately reduce to low. Broil about 3 minutes, checking occasionally. Frittata is done when the edges are brown and the cheese is bubbly (or soft for goat cheese).

Remove from oven and let set about a minute. Cut into eight slices and serve.

Cooking over a campfire? Just place foil on over the pan to cook the top of the frittata.

Chez Marcita Presents: St. Paddy’s Lamb Stew

I’m not Irish, but I love lamb. What could be better for St. Patrick’s Day than lamb stew? Join Bill and me in the kitchen as we create this wheat-free, dairy-free, corn-free one-pot meal. Find the recipe on page 40 of my cookbook, Nothing to Sneeze At: Main Dishes for People with Allergies.

Chez Marcita Presents: Bill’s Fab Meatloaf

I already posted Bill’s meatloaf recipe a few years ago on Life Is Fare, but now you can see the chef in action as he prepares this cozy comfort food. It’s wheat-free, corn-free, and dairy-free, and made with grassfed beef and pastured pork. Happy food heaven!

Chez Marcita Presents: Coq au Vin

I’m not sure who started the big-meal-on-Sunday tradition but it works well for Bill and me. It’s the one day we generally don’t go anywhere so we have plenty of time to cook in the kitchen together. I love making a one-pot meal in the oven those days, especially in the wintertime.

This demo on Coq au Vin is from our cooking videos series. It’s a variation on the recipe in my cookbook Nothing to Sneeze At, which is a variation on Julia Child’s recipe for Coq au Vin. No wheat, no corn, no dairy. I’ll show you how to make this easy chicken-in-a-pot-with wine. And I’ll even show you how to cut up a chicken!

Chez Marcita Presents: Bill’s Oatcakes

See what Sunday morning is like at the Davis-Holm house as Bill and I show you our wheat-free, corn-free oatcake breakfast ritual. (Warning, I’m actually wearing my pajamas but I’ll spare you my bed-head hair by donning a bandanna.)

Sorry, it’s a little long but it’s our first video!

Grassfed Beef Tenderloin

Since Bill and I have been buying our own local grassfed meat, I’m appalled–even disturbed–by the sizes of meat cuts served in mainstream restaurants. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see our tenderloin portion we received in our mixed quarter of beef from Lubbers Farm this year. The filet mignon (French for “cute filet”) is from the smaller end of the tenderloin, which runs along the spine of the cow.

Known as the most tender cut of meat in beef (as well as pork and venison), it’s also the most expensive part. An “average” steer or heifer (probably the feedlot variety) produces just 4 to 6 pounds of tenderloin, which is why our piece from a mixed quarter yielded just .63 pounds.

One saves a special occasion for preparing such a prime piece of meat. For Bill and me, it was New Year’s Eve. I chose an easy recipe but was very vigilant to make sure the meat wasn’t overcooked, especially since grassfed beef takes less time than feedlot meat. It was called Beef Tenderloin with Red Wine Sauce.

What I didn’t expect was for the meat to be cut into two pieces when I opened the package. So I had to be even more watchful since the surface area in the oven was nearly twice as much.

For a recipe like this, it helps to prepare the side dishes in advance as much as possible because the roasting time is fast. After rubbing with fresh garlic and sprinkling the meat with salt and pepper, I preheated the oven and got busy on the sauce. (You’re supposed to do this with the pan drippings after the meat is roasted but I wasn’t anticipating much in the way of drippings so I thought I’d start it and add whatever I could salvage later.)

First I sautéed green onions and garlic in olive oil.

Then I added rice flour instead of wheat flour to accommodate Bill’s allergies, and made a roux.

I added the red wine and some beef stock, omitting the mushrooms because I detest them.

The meat was done in about 25 minutes. I poured the drippings into the sauce and covered the meat with foil to let it rest while we finished the rest of the preparations.

Alongside our tenderloin we had mashed Yukon potatoes with raw milk buttermilk, braised carrots with carmelized onions in balsamic vinegar, and a Caesar salad (plus a wonderful Cabernet Sauvignon and a little bubbly Prosecco to ring in the new year!).

Sirloin Tip Roast with Red Wine

So the last time I made Sirloin Tip Roast I let myself be inspired by dry-heat cooking methods, even though my heroine, Irma Rombauer of The Joy of Cooking, literally shows us in black and white that this meat cut deserves moist heat.

When Bill and I ate it, the meat did seem a bit dry, but I figured at the time that the lean-ness of grassfed meat had a lot to do with the end result.

This time I decided to stick with Irma’s suggestion. I found a recipe on Food.com that called for a dry heat method, i.e., roasted uncovered in the oven, but you also add water and wine to the pot. I loved the idea of rubbing the roast with Dijon mustard—which is really yummy on prime rib—but I decided not to add it because I was going to put a lid on my Dutch oven and that wouldn’t make the mustard nice and crispy like on prime rib. It turned out to be the right approach.

The recipe is simply called Sirloin Tip Roast. As the diagram above shows, this cut is either adjacent to the rump, the flank, or the shank of the cow. And for grassfed beef, it’s extremely lean so cooking time must be reduced.

I followed the beginning of the recipe by taking the roast out of the fridge an hour ahead of time, then sprinkling it with salt and pepper.

Then I poured olive oil in the bottom of my Dutch oven and browned the meat on all sides.

Afterwards, I cut slits in the meat and added sliced garlic cloves, then poured 1/2 a cup of water and 1/4 cup of dry red wine into the pan. Like I said, I skipped the mustard. And, I basically skipped the rest of the ingredients except for some fresh chopped rosemary.

Even when a recipe calls for a rack, I never use one because I don’t own one. Sure, it might be a good idea sometimes, but I don’t want to wreck my pans and I seemed to have done just fine so far without one.

I put the 3-lb. roast in a 325-degree oven with the lid on for just 1  1/2 hours.

I believe it was more moist than last year’s recipe. Served au jus alongside roasted root vegetables, it made a delicious autumn meal—and great leftovers during the week!

Bill-Friendly Fried Green Tomatoes

I don’t know about you but I hate to waste food. So when there are green tomatoes on the vine at the end of summer it’s a great opportunity to make fried green tomatoes. But what do you do when most of the recipes include bread crumbs and/or cornmeal—and you’re allergic to wheat and corn like Bill is?

When I tried making them, I improvised the best I could! Here’s how:

Set-up is key, just like when you make stir-fry. You need to have everything prepared ahead of time because the process of dredging, dipping, and frying goes quickly.

First, slice the tomatoes about 1/4-inch thick.

Then put some buttermilk in a bowl. I used leftover buttermilk from my raw milk butter process because Bill can consume raw cow dairy products (as opposed to pasteurized). If you have a dairy allergy you could try rice milk instead.

Mix together oat flour with some paprika, salt, and pepper and put it on a plate for dredging the tomatoes. (In retrospect, I would probably use brown rice flour since it retains less moisture.)

Beat an egg in a bowl.

For the bread crumbs, use old bread, or create old bread by leaving a few slices out the night before. We use Sami’s Millet & Flax Bread because it doesn’t have wheat or corn in it. (If you don’t have a wheat allergy you could use any kind of plain bread crumbs.) Simply smash the dried bread with your hands or a rolling pin to crumble the bread into small pieces.

Once everything is ready, heat some vegetable oil in a large skillet. I used safflower oil and was very liberal with it so the tomatoes wouldn’t stick.

Then it’s just dip, dredge, dip, dredge—from buttermilk to flour to egg to bread crumbs. And into the pan they go.

Fry on each side for about two minutes or until brown and crispy. If you need to fry in batches, keep the cooked ones warm on a plate in a low oven.

We enjoyed ours with a variation on Bill-Friendly Mac & Cheese on a cool autumn night!

What the Heck is a Fresh Ham Steak?

You’d think with my latest experiments making fresh ham roasts that I’d know what to do with a fresh ham steak. It looks something like a pork steak in the package but a little thicker.

But buying a whole animal from a farmer brings a lot of learning experiences. As usual when I need cooking advice, I went to Google and came across a number of recipes, and this is the one that caught my eye: Pork Scallopini with Butter Caper Sauce.

That’s because it’s easy, quick, and tasty, and it gave me an excuse to use up the fresh raw milk butter I made last week–and which Bill can eat!

I cut up this nearly 2-lb. ham steak into pieces first.

Then I placed them between waxed paper and flattened them with a meat tenderizer.

Next, I sprinkled them with salt and pepper and dredged them in brown rice flour.

In a large, oven-proof skillet, I heated a clove of garlic (smashed) in olive oil until golden, then removed it before browning the cutlets on both sides for about three minutes each.

Then I added some butter and scraped up the browned bits in the pan, and added the wine and lemon juice. By the time I was in the midst of preparing this recipe, I realized I didn’t have any capers, but I’ll add them next time!

I covered the pan and let them cook a little longer in the oven–about three minutes.

Pork Scallopini is delicious with seasonal produce, such as carrots from my garden, sliced yellow onions, and fresh green beans from the farmers market.

Four B’s for Breakfast

Call it indulgent but pretty much every Sunday that Bill and I are in town we make his oat cakes for breakfast, accompanied by a number of accoutrements–especially when blueberries are in season. For a truly decadent breakfast, our meal includes the Four B’s: nitrite-free bacon, buttermilk, blueberries, and Bellinis.

My task is to put the water on the boil for pressed coffee and get the bacon going.

Meanwhile, Bill mixes up the oat cake batter, using buttermilk in lieu of rice milk, which I save after making butter from our raw milk. (As I’ve mentioned before, his cow dairy allergy is toward pasteurized products, but he can tolerate anything made with raw milk.)

Then I play line cook and keep the oat cakes hoppin’ on the griddle.

While I wait for the pancakes to cook I mix up our Bellinis—peach puree and Prosecco made from “Bellini Baubles” that I’ve stashed in the freezer from the season’s white peaches. Sometimes I add a spoonful of Palazzolo’s Lemon Zest Sorbetto to the peach puree before adding Prosecco.

As long as I have some on hand, I throw in a few raspberries, too.

Once the oat cakes and bacon are done, we serve them with whatever berries are in season—still blueberries and raspberries this time of year in Michigan. I also top mine with homemade raw milk yogurt that I’ve strained during breakfast prep.

“You do this every Sunday?” you might ask. We sure do. Not always with Bellinis.  And most of the year without berries. Only half the time with bacon (gotta keep our meat consumption under control!). And about six months with buttermilk. That’s because this is the time of year we get double the milk from our herd share, while cows are lactating. Once their production slows (around December), we’ll go down to half a gallon a week….just enough to use in my coffee and maybe make some yogurt.

But what I think is even more important is that Bill and I share in the cooking—not just Sunday morning breakfast, but many of our meals. We learn things from each other, we spend time together, and we cook for ourselves. I think it’s something people in our country could do more of. And the best part is about half the year we enjoy our meals–sitting down–outside on the patio and surrounded by Nature.