Vegetable Frittata

When I was young, it was important to my mom that I ate eggs. Maybe that’s because eggs are the perfect food, an ideal combination of protein, fat, and a few carbohydrates. Or it could be because they were inexpensive sources of nutrition. Whatever the reason, she would always make them “really special this time”, i.e. adding a squirt of ketchup on the side.

But I have always hated eggs.

With one exception. I enjoyed eggs when I was 7. Having spent the night at a friend’s house, I didn’t want to be rude when her mom made eggs for breakfast the next morning. I ate them and clearly remember enjoying them. But then I got sick. I couldn’t keep those eggs in my stomach.

For the next 23 years, whenever I have been near eggs, the smell and texture trigger that sick feeling in my throat, exactly like that feeling I had in childhood. I refuse to clean pots that eggs have been cooked in. It’s that bad.

But as I become more interested in food, my dislike for eggs is upsetting me. My breakfast options are cut in half. I can never be a judge on Top Chef; they often top their food with eggs.

To get past this, I decide to treat myself like a toddler – introduce eggs into my diet ten times. But, unlike a three-year-old who might wait until the tenth serving to try a bite, I will take a few tastes of each dish.

Jeffrey Steingarten overcame his food phobias when he became the food critic of Vogue:

“I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness,” Steingarten says in The Man Who Ate Everything.

This is my inspiration. I can at least try to like eggs. If I’m successful, I will have expanded my meal choices.

So it seemed like the culinary Dalai Lama was pointing me to The New York Times Dining & Wine section a couple of weeks ago, where Mark Bittman’s recipe for More-Vegetable-Than-Egg Frittata sat, patiently waiting for a non-believer like me to join, in baby steps, the followers of Those-Who-Love-Eggs.

With this recipe in hand, I am ready to take a couple of bites of an egg dish that, really, is mostly vegetables.

I take three bites of my finished frittata (a success, I think!). Bite one, all I can taste is vegetables. Bite two, I get a bit of egg taste. Not so bad. The third bite? All mushy texture. My throat jumps to attention, remembering its role. I am done.

But this is a good start. I will rip the Band-Aid already and prepare ten egg dishes for ten toddler tastes of my most challenging food phobia. One down. Nine to go (or maybe four to go, because 10 egg dishes…well, that’s a lot).