to live an interesting life

Passport & Plate - Tortilla or potato omelette

Spain | Friday, March 14, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
Serves 2-3

1 large potato or 2 medium

1 big onion or 2 small

3 eggs

½ teaspoon salt

 

How to prepare this recipe
1. Peel potatoes and dice them. Don’t care much about size and shape since it is a country food. Peel and cut onions. Fry them separately so they could keep their flavor, stir from time to time.

2. Meanwhile, stir eggs up manually, add salt (and pepper if you want). When the potatoes and onions get nice golden colour, mix them and pour beaten eggs right on the veggies. Cover a frying pan with a lid and roast the omelette on a medium fire for about 3 minutes.

3. Then comes the crucial part – you need to turn the omelette over to fry its other side. Take a flat plate, shift the dish on it, cover it with a reversed frying pan and put it back on fire. In 3-4 minutes the traditional Spanish potato omelette will be ready.

You can dress it with cheese and green or enjoy as it is. Cut it like a cake and serve warm.

 

The story behind this recipe
I went to Barcelona last summer. Though I’d been travelling since 2006 it was for the first time when I plunged into the adventure alone. I did that spontaneously,bought the tickets on Friday and left next day. No trip-plan, unknown country, no exact address of my future home.On board I decided to make a list of things I was eager to see,try. The less probable point was a cooking experience (I had great time during previous summer in Istanbul learning how to cook different Turkish food. My classmate is living there. But I knew no one in Barcelona). But it was realized!So sudden and amazing.I lived in a flat rented out by a nice Russian woman Natalia.Her mother was born in Spain, but Natalia’d spent most of her life in Russia.She went to Spain very often and bought a flat by the time I came. She shared a lot of stories about this country,advised on transport, sights and at the end of my journey without asking me (I didn’t tell her about my cooking idea either) took me to the kitchen: “it was in 1965. A great competition took place on a Bay of Biscay not far from Bilbao. A lot of men from all over Spain arrived,brought their pans and ingredients, they cooked Tortilla on a seaside. A champion cooked Tortilla one meter in diameter.And they managed to turn the gigantic omelette over”.I still remember astonished Natalia’s eyes. Imagine mine,we were going to cook it!As soon as I’d arrived to Spain I bought something that looked unfamiliar to me (one of my travelling traditions). It looked like a cake, was called a potato omelette. I was so happy to realize it needed ingredients I could easily get at home. I taught my mom to cook Tortilla. She’d traditionally cooked omelette from eggs and milk, she tried only mashed or fried potatoes at home, it had never occurred to her to mix them. That was an astonishing look on usual ingredients. Nowadays we can cook it in the oven, but it’s more interesting to follow the original recipe feeling the atmosphere of old provincial Spane.