Veggie and Sausage Frittata

I hope I didn’t lure anyone here under false pretenses. “Diana’s Daily Dish” is seldom daily (and probably never will be) and has yet to feature a dish as in “a particular item of prepared food” or “a container for holding or serving food”. I meant dish in the “idle talk; gossip” sense of the word, though in searching for “official” definitions on the internet, it could also refer to “a good-looking person, especially an attractive woman”, hmm. So sorry if you were expecting posts about my daily pottery pieces or something like that but it's basically for my "idle talk" about life and "Diana’s Daily Dish" was alliterative and catchy, oh and my name is Diana, if you didn't catch that. I do love to cook so I’ll try to include some more cooking and recipe posts (hint hint, like this one).

Last week I started a pantry/freezer clean out and while I made some progress they are both still pretty full. In an effort to finish up a few more food items hogging space in the fridge and freezer and to make something for breakfast this week, this frittata recipe was born. Frittatas are super easy to make and are great for using up whatever you may have on hand. In the past, I’ve made these in cupcake pans for individual servings but I wasn't in the mood to scrub the baked on egg mixture out of 12 cupcake holes, something I’ve yet to avoid, so this was baked in small, shallow baking dish… and the frittata is thin enough I can throw it between some bread or a bagel to eat on the go. Feel free to substitute your favorite ingredients.

Warning: I'm one of those cooks that eyeballs everything, so amounts and time may vary! 

Ingredients:  

1 TBS olive oil

1/2 cup frozen chopped bell pepper (from my garden, defrosted)

2/3 cup frozen shredded potatoes (defrosted)

1 Italian chicken sausage, chopped

1/4 cup onion, chopped

1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach (defrosted and drained)

Cooking spray

4 eggs

1/4 cup skim milk

Salt, pepper, garlic powder, chili powder, etc. (any of your favorite spices)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 ºF. Add olive oil to hot pan, add peppers, potatoes, sausage and onion. Stir and cook 5-7 minutes or until ingredients begin to brown. Add spinach and your favorite spices, stir to combine, remove from heat and let cool. In separate bowl, combine eggs and milk, whisk to combine. After vegetable/sausage mixture has cooled for a few minutes (basically you don't want to start cooking your eggs by adding them to super hot veggies), add to greased baking dish. Pour egg mixture over vegetables/sausage. You may need to stir it a bit to combine. Bake 20-30 minutes until eggs begin to brown in the center (will depend on the size/depth of your pan). Makes approximately 4 (generous) servings.

While I’m saving it for breakfast this week, I took a small bite and it was delicious. I plan on adding some cheese and maybe a bagel thin to make a breakfast sandwich very similar to the Dunkin’ Donuts turkey sausage/veggie flat bread.

Oh and here was my dinner I threw together as the egg dish was baking.

(It's kind of hard to take an appetizing picture of sausage)

Leftover frozen veggies in cheese sauce (I added black pepper and chili powder) and Italian chicken sausage on a slice of Sourdough Italian bread with Italian cheese blend and BBQ sauce (it worked, trust me).

Fill in the Blank Friday

I caught this on Meagan's Blog and it looks like fun!

 Check it out here: Fill In the Blank Friday


 

1.   If my house was on fire and I could only grab 3 things I would grab  Harris (the cat), my purse and my laptop.

2.  A smell I really like is  camping ( a mixture of pine needles, wood smoke and tent nylon).

3.  Something you might not know about me is  I once held my school's track and field record in the 55M dash and the 300M run. These are exclusive to indoor track and I was on our school's first indoor track team, I was the first person to run these races, thus establishing the school record, I'm sure they have since been broken.

4.  Some of my favorite websites to putter about on are   Apartment Therapy, various message boards, the dreaded Facebook, All Over Albany, etc .

5.  This weekend I will be hanging around Albany and maybe hosting my mom for a night!.

6. Nothing makes me happier than  discovering a great new band or artist, especially if it happens when I'm seeing them live for the first time.

7.  A bad habit I have is  what I'm calling overwhelmed procrastination (when it takes forever to get a certain something done because I'm doing multiple somethings at once)   .

Happy Friday!!

Stylish Blogger Award

Well thank you very much, though I'm not sure how stylish I'd consider my blog to be considering my most visited post is mostly about mud but... thanks Jillian and Kate!

                                   

The rules:

1. Post and link back to the person who awarded you this award Thank you Jillian and Kate!
2. Share 7 things about yourself 

3. Award 15 recently discovered great bloggers
4. Contact these bloggers and tell them they’ve won!

So 7 things about me:

1. I have an argyle fixation.
2. I catch a lot of live music.
3. When I don't have enough going on, I become an extreme procrastinator.
4. I'll take salty over sweet any day.
5. I'm fiercely independent.
6. I make hypocritical food choices. Organic, garden grown veggies one day, fast food the next. (I'm working on it).
7. I'm an infrequent blogger (trying to work on that).

Many of my favorite blogger friends have already received this award so  I'll try to shake things up a bit.

So some blogs I'm digging these days...

http://www.healthytippingpoint.com/

http://smartprettyandawkward.com/

http://jackfit.blogspot.com/

http://catalogliving.net/

http://www.epbot.com/

http://graphjam.memebase.com/

http://www.jimspancakes.com/

http://www.nataliedee.com/

http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/

Sorry that's all I've got for now!

Garden Recap

(I just noticed this post was deleted, so I'm reposting it, sorry if you got it again!)

While facing below zero temps today, let’s reflect on and look forward to warm temperatures and sunshine! (BTW, this is a modified repost from the first blog I started and abandoned.)

In the summer of 2010 I decided to go out on a limb and start a garden. Living in a small apartment with an even smaller porch this required a little help from the lovely folks at Capitol District Community Gardens. For $20 and a little work, I was granted a 15'' x 15'' plot in the Rensselaer Family Garden. It's located in a quiet residential neighborhood with about 14 garden plots. It's a nice and small community of gardeners ranging from young inexperienced gardeners (like me) to retired couples with time and experience to share.

The pictures are taken just about a month apart from May 12 - August 7th. Over Memorial Day weekend and beyond I planted peppers (bell, Italian, pablano), tomatoes, eggplant, lettuce, basil, cilantro, spaghetti squash, patty pan squash, sunflowers, gladiolas, and marigolds. It was an amazing learning experience and I've loved almost every minute of it! Even better, the rewards were tasty!

It was a great year for peppers and they are one of my favorite things to eat. They were still blooming and fruiting when I tore them up in November. Eggplants were slow to start and then really took off in the hot weather of July. My squashes died from powdery mildew from summer humidity; I did my best to treat it but with everyone in the garden having it, there was little I could do. But randomly a zucchini popped up and gave me a few squashes so it wasn’t a total loss on the squash front. The herbs (cilantro and basil) were amazing. There is nothing like picking fresh herbs and running home to add them to your dinner. Tomatoes were abundant as well, I gave plenty away and make a few batches of tomato sauce that would make an Italian grandmother proud.

So for 2011, what’s the plan? Garden sign ups start next week so first things first, I’ll have to sign up for a plot again. I’m not sure if I can switch plots yet, but I’d one closer to the water source and one that gets a bit more sun. I want to plant some things that I can harvest early so I want to look into planting some peas, lettuce, etc that will be ready early, aka more instant satisfaction. I want to plant sauce tomatoes (plum or roma) so I can make even better tomato sauce. I’ll look into canning as well so I can enjoy it all year long. I can probably get away with planting fewer pepper plants, 20+ is probably a bit much for one person. I want to be better about staggering my herb plantings, every two-three weeks should be good and keep me from getting overwhelmed with herbs and then left with nothing. Otherwise it will just be fun to get back out there. It got to be a little much last October and November, but hey, a garden that just won’t quit is a great problem to have.

So then that happened...

Just when I was getting in the blogging spirit again... my laptop died. It is supposedly fixed... but due to lightning speed shipping on behalf of Dell and FedEx, it's at my mom's house where I expected to be when it arrive (you know, 4 days from now). Seriously... it took less than 12 hours to go from Houston to Syracuse... I'm not sure you could fly that fast.

Between Christmas and The Rock Boat... I can't promise any posts soon, but I'll try (assuming my laptop is indeed fixed).

Tuned In

Quite a few weeks ago I had a great weekend where I saw one of my favorite bands, Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, twice and spent a lot of time in the car listening to music and podcasts. The whole weekend seemed to be about people recalling music that influenced them when they were younger; cue blog inspiration.

Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers performed a special two-set Halloween show in Rochester where they paid homage to Pearl Jam before coming back out for a normal set. While playing music from Ten, Stephen told stories about listening to the music of Pearl Jam and specific songs from the album during his younger years. On the trek home the next day I listened to an episode of NPRs: All Songs Considered, titled: “Tunes That Got You Through Your Teens”. The episode was inspired by a dad who wrote to the ASC folks to ask for music he could give his daughter on her 13^th birthday to help get her through the tumultuous teen years. It was an episode filled with great music and great stories that had special meaning to people. I had a lot of time in the car to think about the music that got me through my teen years and where music has taken me since.

Growing up my first musical influence, as you might expect, were my parents. They played me a lot of music from bands like The Rolling Stones, The Beetles, John Denver, Journey, Van Morrison, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, The Eagles, and many more. Later, in my early teen years my music was mostly influenced by my friends and whatever was playing on MTV and pop radio, you know back when MTV played music.

It wasn’t until I was around 15 or 16 that I started to branch out and discover music for myself. For me it was the combination of Napster and lyric websites that spun my independent taste in music. I would spend hours just looking up lyrics from bands and songs I’d never heard of and if the lyrics caught my eye, I’d download the song and wait 4 hours to see if I liked it. How did I stumble across Vertical Horizon? I have no idea, but their lyrics did something for me and to this day they are one of my favorite bands.

“Always trying to make love out of care

The perfect recipe but something wasn't there.”

–Sunrays and Saturdays

(Come on, those lyrics just scream out to at teenager with a broken heart.)

My second big musical evolution happened  when I was in college and I went to a concert that changed my interest in music for life. I had just come from a rugby game, I was dirty, smelly, probably a little drunk, tired and sore. We grabbed our spots near the front to watch the opening act – The Gabe Dixon Band and they blew me away.  To this day, I can’t tell you who the main act was (either Guster or Ben Folds). The Gabe Dixon Band had it all for me, great lyrics, great live music and great stage performance. I bummed $5 from one of my friends (Thanks Renee) and bought their short EP and discovered that sometimes great music can’t be found in the record store or from Napster and that a great live performance will make me a fan for life. 

In the past three years since finishing up my Master's and getting a full time job, I've had the free time and income to support my music addiction hobby. I've gone to well over 50 concerts, traveled thousands of miles and have seen music everywhere from a small coffee shop in Albany with 15 other people, to a crowded outdoor amphitheater with 25,000 people, to the main deck of a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean with 2000 music fans. Hey, we all have our addictions hobbies. 

Is music a big part of your life? How did you catch the music bug? What catches your interest?

Gratuitous apology

So.... it's been awhile. Thanks for not deleting me from your blog reader, I'll try to be better about posting on the regular.

I'm working on a blog post at the moment...well... at this moment I'm writing this let's procrastinate on a real blog post by writing an "I"m sorry for not updating" post. But I swear, I'll get back to my other post right after this!