Early Morning Eggspertise
I’d had a hankering to make a frittata, so I made sure I got up early enough this morning to get it done. There is a bit of work to construct what amounts to a baked omelet (or a egg pizza if you like), but it’s light-lifting and worth it.
The basics of a frittata are as follows: Sauté whatever veggies and meats you want in the frittata in olive oil or butter (like pizza toppings, the combinations are limitless). My version here has onion, mushrooms, one chopped potato (steamed first to speed things up), and cooked bacon and breakfast sausage that I had in the fridge. Top with eight beaten eggs, then top with cheese (I used parmesan as recommended in a Mark Bittman recipe, but any grated cheese you like will work). Cook on the stovetop until barely set (about five minutes), then put into a 350-degree oven for about five minutes or under the broiler for a couple of minutes to brown and finish.
Google “frittata” and you’ll find thousands of recipes and some twists on the technique (e.g. the amount of time on stovetop versus oven, how much cheese/dairy, etc.). The result is surprisingly filling, and if you can get by with slicing the frittata into eight pieces (remember that this amounts to one whole egg per slice), then you’ve done about a half-hour of work for multiple meals.
Now, this may seem like an odd time to be promoting using lots of eggs, given that many grocery stores have eggs in short supply at high prices. This has becoming the stuff of jokes on the internet about a black market for eggs or eggs as a status symbol.
But guess what? Local eggs produced by small farms are in normal supply, and prices have remained steady. Why is that? Because the main cause of the overall egg shortage is a contagion of avian flu that hit last year and killed millions of birds. Avian flu is a catastrophe mainly for factory farms, where chickens and turkeys live in crowded and confined conditions. Smaller farms that raise their laying hens outdoors or on pasture are far less vulnerable to these problems.
On recent Saturdays, I picked up a dozen eggs each from Jake’s Country Meats and Ellis Family Farms, each for $6.99 a dozen. That’s a price tag that might have made a lot of folks blanch not long ago, but that price differential with grocery store eggs has shrunk dramatically. And the best thing about it is that the eggs are actually available.
If you want to learn more, click below for an article on the Illinois Newsroom site titled “Amid a National Egg Shortage, Local Farmers Continue to Deliver.”
This Weekend’s Illinois Farmers Market Schedule
Here’s the list of this weekend’s markets across the state where you can get those nutritious, delicious, sustainably produced, affordable local eggs… and lots of other great stuff.