Man, what is with me and the eggs lately? Constant eggs! I'm in that part of the phase where I still love eggs and want them, but am starting to feel like it's too much. Time to break out the spring vegetables instead.

In the meantime, I totally made and ate a 3-egg tortilla the other night. I wanted tapas; this worked fine.

Spanish tortillas are so good! The egg here really should be only a binding agent for lots of delicious potatoes, plus any other addenda you like. I wanted zucchini, so I added some of that. Then everything worked together in perfect harmony, and I ate my tortilla and went to bed.

That said, it's 3 eggs and butter and oil and it's a good thing it's been a year and a half since the last time I had one.

Tortilla with potato and zucchini

butter/olive oil
onion
potatoes
zucchini
eggs
salt, pepper, paprika

Warm some olive oil on medium in a small nonstick frying pan. Chop up a yellow onion and throw it into the oil to start softening. Scrub and dice a couple of potatoes. I used one yukon gold and one redskin, which turned out fine for just me; use more if you are feeding more than one person.

Add the potatoes to the onions, stir, and cook to brown on all sides. Potatoes can suck up a lot of oil, so watch it and add some if you need to. Otherwise, just keep shaking the pan and flipping potato bits every couple minutes until they are nice and crispy and clearly awesome. When they're done, tip them all out into a bowl and set them aside for a minute.

Dice up a zucchini, add it to the hot pan, and do the same with it. You want roughly as much zucchini as potato, or maybe a little less. Crispy zucchini bits!

Now you can dump the potato and onion mix back into the pan with the zucchini. Mix it all up and make sure everything is hot through.

Crack a couple eggs into a bowl, beat them with a fork, season them with salt, pepper, and paprika, and pour them over the zucchini and potato. Tilt the pan to get egg good and everywhere; it should run down between the vegetables to cover them. When two eggs turned out not to be enough to cover my pan, I just beat and added another one. Flexible!

Cook, shaking the pan and running a silicon or wooden spatula around the edge, until the eggs are partly set and the whole creation is fully loose from the bottom of the pan. This should take maybe three or four minutes.

Now we get to flip the tortilla. This can be intimidating, but don't worry! You can do it!

First, get out a plate the same size or larger than your pan. Use your spatula to coax the entire tortilla out of the pan and onto your plate. Hold the plate on the palm of one hand and pick up the pan in the other. Then flip the frying pan directly over the plated tortilla.

Holding the pan and plate firmly together, carefully flip them over. Remove the plate; the tortilla should have fallen into the pan upside down. Put the pan back over the heat and cook to set the eggs on the other side, maybe two minutes.


Then coax the whole business out of the pan again, cut it into substantial sixths, and eat it.

A tortilla really wants to be eaten with a massive salad, which in my case I had not got. Instead I had it with sour cream, for ultimate dairy explosion. I did have the also requisite red wine, however: malbec.

This whole experience was way too rich, so I ended up only having 2/3 a tortilla for dinner. The other two sixths I ate cold for breakfast the next day. This works admirably well. Tapas! Tapas for breakfast! I mean, I didn't get any tapenade to go with it, but I can deal with that.