Just to get this out of the way, I will confess that I started making frittatas because I can’t make a decent omelet. There was a time when I told myself that I should, must, would learn this impressive culinary skill. But then I had the good fortune to marry a man who (among other laudable talents) can make perfect omelets. This one skill on his part makes us a veritable Jack Sprat and his wife in the kitchen!
I will also say, in my defense, that I find the omelet genre a little limiting. Making good omelets requires restraint - very few ingredients, a nice paper-thin layer of eggs, precise technique and timing. When egg night comes around, it’s usually towards the hairy middle of the week when people are hungry, time is short, and ingredients are likely to be random. I’m more for pulling out anything that needs to be used up in the fridge and throwing it together in one convenient pan, with leftovers a bonus for tomorrow’s lunch. Although I have blocked out specific memories of this, I’m pretty sure that early on in my cooking existence fritattas were just overly thick, failed omelets that I chucked under the broiler so they wouldn’t be runny.
In other words, this is not the sort of dish for which a recipe is required. Like all dishes that can be called ‘peasant cuisine,’ it is the food equivalent of monkeys with typewriters.* Given a certain amount of time in a kitchen containing basic ingredients, one is bound eventually to throw eggs and some other things together in a skillet and discover that the only way to cook it through is to run it under the broiler at the end. Finding that this is likely to taste good, and that the leftovers make a delicious lunch, practiced technique and variation will arise.
I think I finally formalized my frittata skills into a genre the year I had a garden up in the Hudson Valley that produced copious amounts of Swiss chard. I remember processing sink-full after sink-full of the stuff. Chard freezes well (blanched, in bags) and thawed frozen chard is made for eggs. That winter there were quiches, there were these timbales, but above all there was chard frittata. (Incidentally the timbale link requires a resounding aside in favor of Swiss chard and Loire Cabernet Franc. Long may they live together! And the current Baudry Granges (2006) is so delicious.)
One of the other vegetables that seems made for frittata is zucchini (and its related squash friends). Except that, unlike chard, the time for zucchini frittata is fleeting. That time is now-the beginning of the season, when zucchini are small, sweet, nutty and firm. It happily coincides with the beginning of new garlic (hoorah, hoorah!) and occurs before the relentless squash has become big and tiresome and something to hide in other dishes.
I had a wonderful zucchini frittata last Wednesday at Terroir. This was a restaurant I approached with a certain amount of trepidation-admittedly trepidation of the “not-wanting-to-belong-to-any-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member” sort. I had a friend meeting me who has a low hipster/bullshit threshold (as well as impeccable taste in wine) and who had had an extremely trying day. I wasn’t sure if it would be possible for a restaurant to do things like having a whole page of Beaujolais (served at the right temperature) and only serving Riesling by the glass all summer (with Tshirts to prove it) without all the wine geekdom crescendoing into a cooler-than-thou, wink-wink, mildly threatening roar. I came prepared to flee if necessary.
Fleeing was not necessary. Apparently the feat is possible, and the zucchini frittata was a clincher. It was thick and brown and homely and garlicky and full of good olive oil and zucchini. The bread alongside was crusty and the slice was generous. This hearty, simple, delicious and unpretentious foodstuff cast the proclamations of the menu and wine list in a kind and gleeful light. I allowed myself to covet the “Phylloxera” sticker on one of the wine list binders. (Imagine, if you will, the word Phylloxera printed in rococo script, like the name of a 1980’s hair/metal band, white on a black background…. Having just spent several weeks perusing the history of scholarly research on phylloxera for a Botany paper I found this simply hil-larious.)** We ordered a bunch more food (the paninis are superlative as declared, although the fried lamb was declared an “enh” by all), we drank a bottle of deliciously ethereal Beaujolais (Cheysson Chiroubles 2004), and the bill was not, by New York standards, horrendous.
I found myself still relishing that zucchini frittata two days later, and so I made myself a version with summer squash and fresh garlic (topped with a sprinkle of my new favorite condiment for everything egg-related) for lunch. And this, too, was delicious. 
* See for Documentation The Silver Spoon, which I treasure for its beautifully concise three-ingredient-per recipe, three-recipes-per-page format (all of which assume a level of technique gained from a life heretofore of watching other people cook) and unpretentiously monotonous photographic style. All of which, and its heft, annoys some people about this book, but which makes me love it (and the heft, I find, is also useful for pressing botanical specimens.)
** I refrained from obtaining photographic evidence; I think taking pictures of one’s food (and other stuff) in restaurants is absolutely annoying and detrimental to proper enjoyment. This is what I never, ever, want my life to come to, blog or no.
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