Rest assured, if you like something I've made and want the recipe, it's yours. And I would never even consider leaving out an ingredient to ensure that my dish would always be better. Although, I've eaten things that suggest other cooks are not that magnanimous.
Yes, my arm hurts from patting myself on the back.
You see, my efforts at honesty and generosity are no guarantee that you'll ever get the recipe, or that it'll taste the way it did at my house.
It's more about my memory. I often forget that someone somewhere asked for something. And problems often crop up even when I do remember all of that.
Like the other day when my husband said Jen, a friend at work, had seen him eating leftover frittata and asked for the recipe. He wondered if I knew which Web site I'd found it on. Oddly enough, no.
So the next morning, I decided to type up the recipe from memory. The first thing that came back to mind was that I had read the recipe, couldn't get it to print out in fewer than 72 pages, and decided to go with whatever key points I could remember by the time I got to the kitchen, three steps away.
It wasn't my first frittata, and that helped. The other one I'd made half a dozen times about a dozen and a half years ago. So, I knew I could skip the potatoes that we were out of and could add whatever I could find. That's actually the beauty of frittatas, a Spanish word loosely translated "anything but the kitchen sink."
The new recipe said I should add 2 Tbs. of half and half or water or milk but that the half and half was better. We had it, so I used it. It also said that you should cook the vegetables in oil before pouring the eggs and your laundry-list ingredients over it. So, I tamped down the urge to use butter instead.
Unfortunately for Jen, the recipe quickly morphed into more about how it came to be than the ingredients themselves, and I was in the mood to share it all:
1. You can use as many eggs as you like; the recipe writer recommended a dozen, if you want it to be tall and full of lunch-leftovers potential. (I used six because I only had 12; my frying pan was 10-inch instead of the 12 she used; and personal history told me that I’d have trouble enough getting six cooked all the way through.)
2. I cooked the bacon on a foiled-lined cookie sheet, at 400, after forking holes into it to prevent curling.
3. Below, I suggest combining everything but the vegetables with the eggs and pouring it on all at once. Truthfully, since I was winging it, I added the eggs and then the other things as I thought of them, and there was no problem.
4. The recipe mentions putting the cheese on last and broiling it, but I didn’t feel like bothering; plus, the frying pan had a plastic handle. As a cheese lover, I would have enjoyed tripling the cheese and broiling until golden brown. So, laziness saved me a few hundred calories and unknown grams of fat.
It was a snap, so I soon clicked send and it was on its virtual journey to Canandaigua.
Moments later, though, I discovered that I had, indeed, left an ingredient out. I was walking by the dining room table and noticed a note from Fred, reminding me to send the recipe. He'd even given it a name: Shrimp and Bacon Frittata.
Oops ... I hadn't mentioned the shrimp. So, I sent it quickly, aware that its absence could signal that I actually do hold back when sharing.
But, if I were inclined to make some ingredients secret, I hope I'm a tad smarter than putting it in the title.
If I remembered, that is.
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