OMG! David's Coming Home For Dinner!

Thank God I watch television. And thank God I watched it a lot in the last ten days. Tonight's dinner was inspired by three cooking shows:

1. Chopped, a show on the Food Network. Four chefs. Three Rounds: appetizer, entree, dessert. For each round, chefs are given a basket of food and asked to make a dish using the ingredients. Usually there's a weird ingredient thrown in to make the competition more lively and challenging. At the end of each round tone chef is eliminated until there is one chef left who is declared the Chopped champion.

2. Some Irish cooking show I watched at some time in the midst of my fluey stupor. I have no idea what channel it was on or even what day. I think it was afternoon when I watched it. I remember the chef making a potato dish and thought it was brilliant!

3. And then there was the guest chef on another show ( I have no memory of who he was or what show he was on). All I remember is that he was doing kale recipes and he did a raw kale salad and "massaged" it with the vinaigrette dressing.

So what does any of this have to do with dinner tonight?

It's Tuesday night. Usually David goes out to dinner with some guys before their men's group meeting. Lately we haven't seen much of each other. He's been working late hours on a deadline for work. I've had the flu. We've hardly said two words to each other. Today I'm feeling better. He decided to come home for dinner before his meeting to see me. Yea! It's practically a date!

Since I know he's going to his meeting, I know we don't have time to cook dinner together when he gets home. I need to get something started. There isn't much food in the house and I want to make something yummy. Here's what I found in the refrigerator and the pantry: eggs, asparagus, zucchini, red onions, potatoes, smoked trout. What would you do if you got this basket?

I admit it's not too unusual a set of ingredients. The weirdest ingredient is the tin of smoked trout.  A frittata seems like a  pretty sure bet. I sautéed the onions, asparagus and zucchini until they were soft and had a tinge of caramelization on them. 





Then I set them aside and opened the tin of trout and broke the fillets into pieces and added it to the veggies. I beat the eggs in a bowl and added the veggie/trout mixture and poured it into a baking dish and popped it in the oven.

For the potatoes, I did what I saw on the Irish cooking show except that I substituted coconut oil for butter. Slice a sliver off the bottom of the potato so it stands flat and doesn't roll around. Then cut a series of slices about 1/8 to 1/4 inches apart across the length of the potato. Place potatoes in a baking dish. Melt the coconut oil and pour over the potatoes so it seeps down into the crevices. Season with salt and pepper and herbs. I had lemon thyme from my garden in the freezer so I used that. Bake in the oven. As the potato cooks, the slices open and the potato fans out.

David got home. The buzzer went off and it was time to get dinner out of the oven. The frittata had puffed up like a soufflé. The potatoes blossomed into fanned out perfection. And since every plate needs some fresh green burst of goodness, I "massaged" spinach and mixed green with a homemade mustard vinaigrette.

David said dinner was beautiful and delicious. The smoked trout gave the frittata a wonderful depth of flavor and sense of substance. And he loved the potato. And who wouldn't love  massaged salad greens?

As David leaves to go to his men's group meeting and bay at the moon (or whatever they do), I am pretty sure I can safely say no one's getting chopped from this kitchen tonight!