May 18th, 2009
Tortilla de Patas & Shaved Fennel Salad
The post in which my earlier hubris over the great success with the braised oxtails gets the best of me!
I was aiming for a quick weeknight meal, since things have been a bit busy ’round these parts, and a fritatta-type thing with fennel salad seemed like a great option.
It was, though things didn’t turn out exactly as planned.
The fennel salad was great – shaved fennel is still one of my favourite salad greens (and pretty much the sole thing we use our mandoline for) – and the addition of some hard, salty sheep’s cheese was excellent.
The torta, well, it was tasty, but pretty ugly.
One kitchen skill that’s always been tough for me is tempering eggs (tempering refers to the blending of ingredients at different temperatures). When working with eggs, the challenge comes in not scrambling them with the heat of your hot ingredients before you really want to start the cooking process. It involves slowly mixing the ingredients to gradually bring the cooler eggs up to temperature, and requires a lot of patience (which I am generally pretty short on).
This particular application didn’t completely fail, but I had scrambled the eggs enough by the time they hit the pan that my tart didn’t really have any sort of hope of flipping cleanly. I tried anyhow, and the result was a messy pan and a lot of cursing.
Thankfully, eggs and potatoes are pretty forgiving foodstuffs, and it still tasted great as a scramble instead of a torta. And the fennel salad was an excellent accompaniment. Making this again, I’d probably try baking it in the oven, rather than torturing myself trying to flip it. Which would, conveniently, also alleviate much of my “temper” tantrum.
Tortilla de Patas – page 192 & Shaved Fennel Salad – page 164