Italian Tortilla

Tonight, I was faced with a typical daily problem for many people all throughout the world. I had no idea what to make for dinner. I looked into our fridge, and noticed the contents: leftover stew, leftover pot pie, leftover mashed potatoes, etc. All looked like viable options, but then my eyes settled on “the big one.”

A few nights ago I made spaghetti. An experienced cook knows that in the kitchen, you must have a systematic approach to whatever meal you are preparing so that nothing ends up sitting and waiting for the other foods to be prepared, thus avoiding unnecessary microwaving and serving overcooked food to the table. With spaghetti, this is a real trick. Pasta tends to go rubbery when it cools, and tomato sauce is best when it has simmered for a while, but the juice from the meat adds flavor to the sauce, so all must finish right around the same time.

Well, instead of trying to sit down and figure out a system to spaghetti, I just start cooking, and inevitably, my “system” crashes. The other night, as I was in the middle of my fatal spaghetti system error, my wife came home from work and offered to help me. I was saved! I asked her to help by putting the noodles in the water which had just come to a boil, thought nothing of it, and continued slaving over my sauce to make it perfect.  Well, in the middle of my frenzy, I forgot to specify how many noodles to put in the water, and my wife dumped the whole box, a large box, into the water.

So, now, in our fridge we have a LARGE mixing bowl full of leftover spaghetti noodles. When deciding what to do for dinner, I passed over the potatoes and pot pie, and decided that come hell or high water, I was going to use up some of our ample supply of cooked spaghetti noodles. I just had no idea how.  Quick and easy pasta recipes are a dime a dozen, but I wanted something creative, new and exciting. Fortunately for me, I live in the internet age, and I no longer have to be creative or original, because I can access the creativity of millions of other people.

So, lo and behold, I found a recipe for a unique dish that I had never eaten whose main ingredient is leftover spaghetti noodles. The website where I found the recipe calls it a “spaghetti pancake,” although I will be referring to it as an “italian tortilla.” It is very similar to a spanish tortilla (tortilla espanola), but instead of using potatoes, it uses spaghetti noodles. In a nutshell, it consists of beating eggs together and mixing the noodles in with the eggs, pouring it all together into a frying pan, and when one side hardens and browns, you flip it over until the other side hardens. It forms a sort of quiche or pie looking dish.

I can’t say it was the best thing I had ever eaten, but it was different, easy to make and could be made into a much better dish than my first effort yielded with the addition of a few choice ingredients. And if I ever want to show up to a potluck with something nobody has ever seen before, bingo bango italian tortilla.  It even sounds exotic.  The point is, life is constantly offering little opportunities to spit in the eye of monotony, and tonight all I had to do was look in the fridge.