Five serves of vegetables a day doesn’t seem like that much. I love vegetables and eat lots of them. But it’s amazing how easy it is to miss a day or two. Lunch at a work meeting, nice rolls with turkey and cranberry, but really only a bit of lettuce you could count as a vegetable. Late home for dinner, make a quick pasta with a vegetarian tomato based sauce but really only a couple of serves of vegetables in it.
This takes me literally less than 10 minutes to make, and half of that time I can multi-task, it is really delicious, low fat, high protein, low GI, and there’s two serves of vegetables straight up. And one of them is silver beet, which is coming right into season now – I’m starting to pick it in bulk in my garden.. Women specially can use all the iron and folic acid they can get into their diet, and feel so good for it. And I think this might be a good way to get kids interested in silverbeet.
The Recipe:
(Serves two adults for breakfast)
Into the food processor put:
- two big silver beet leaves stripped from their stems
- a spring onion, greens and all
- a big sprig of parsley stripped from the stem
- a small sweet pepper, or about a quarter of a standard sized capsicum
- 4 cherry tomatoes
- a heaped dessertspoon of low fat cottage cheese
- a slice of low fat tasty cheese or parmesan
- 2 large eggs or 3 of the little eggs my bantam crosses lay
- salt and pepper
Put a teaspoon of butter on to melt in a heavy based frypan.
Whiz the ingredients in the processor for just a few seconds, use a plastic spatula to scrape down and whiz again. The idea is to avoid blending it too much, just chopping the ingredients together.
Pour the lot into the pan, turn the heat down to very low, put a lid on, and try to avoid peeking more than is necessary. Cook for around 5 minutes until the top is just set. The trick here is to have the heat low enough and the lid on enough so that it sets without the bottom burning.
Meanwhile you can make coffee and toast to go with it.
Cut the frittata into quarters. It should be set enough so that you can flip one quarter on top of another. (If it breaks up, doesn’t matter, just won’t “plate up” Masterchef style!) Turn the heat off and leave it for a minute – the residual heat will make sure the middle (which was the top) sets – I really don’t like unset eggs.
A slice of sourdough toast on the side, and you’re set up for the day.
Such an easy meal frittata. Spinach and eggs are a match I always love.
Great healthy breakfast! Now I need to find a sub for the silverbeet, which I can’t stand.. 😉 Maybe the green leaves from our perennial leeks, or some self-sown spinach.. 🙂
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Spinach will do the trick perfectly. My spinach is just getting to pickable now. I actually like spinach better than silver beet in most recipes, but in my part of the world it has a much shorter season.
Kale will work instead of silverbeet or spinach – no oxalates, lots of calcium and other brassica goodies. George Mateljan’s site http://www.whfoods.org/ is a really good (US) site for healthy food and cooking, and his book and DVD are excellent.
good idea. I love kale and I have heaps of it at the moment. (But I do have to say, silver beet or spinach with eggs and cheese is an inspired combination!)
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