Tomato and Egg Toast - the student version

My lunches tend to be fairly boring - porridge, actually. I can live on the stuff because I think it's delicious beyond belief, very warming, and fills you up far more than it should for the calories. But even I recognise that you can have too much of a good thing, and I had a loaf of bread to use up and a pasta sauce tub waving at me from the fridge. Erp.  You know us students, we live on pasta (supposedly)... I actually only had it this week because Tesco had a really nice sauce and some posh Cappellini on offer. I'd say using a nice simple tomato and basil sauce like I did, not one of the creamy cheesy ones, works better, but I can't vouch for this so just experiment with your leftovers. Alternatively, making your own sauce really isn't that difficult!

Anyway, there are far more complicated versions of this recipe around, but I'd call this the student version. The toast becomes soaked in the sauce and the egg is a really nice contrast in flavour and texture. Every time I have some pasta on the menu, this is now definitely going to be lunch the next day. I think I might even have to start having pasta more often...

Some more complicated versions can be found here, at "Smitten Kitchen", and here, at "A Pastry Affair". They both springboarded off the same recipe, then I springboarded off theirs. One of the main differences is that they both poached the eggs - I fried mine in Fry Light, so not too unhealthy, but mainly because poaching isn't something I've yet tried. The other variation is that they made their sauce... I was using leftovers.

Another nice variation - or perhaps the original! - is Shakshuka, which is definitely on the cards sometime.

Please excuse the truly terrible photo, I had enough battery left to turn the camera on and immediately take the photo wherever it happened to be pointing... I never knew eggs were so reflective!

Tomato and Egg Toast for pasta-guzzling students

Leftover pasta sauce (around about 125g, or enough to generously drizzle over 2 pieces of toast)
1 egg
2 slices bread

1. Fry an egg.
2. Warm up your pasta sauce in the microwave or on the hob.
3. Cook and lightly butter the toast.
4. Pour the pasta sauce over the toast.
5. Flop the egg on the top.

If you need more instructions than that (in fact, if you needed the instructions at all), just get thee to a kitchen...

Spinach and Feta Frittata

I've had a lifelong semi-dislike of omelettes. I don't quite know what it is, I think the egginess overwhelms me after a while. This situation wasn't helped by being asked, in a university interview, how many people you could feed with an omelette made out of an ostrich egg. I didn't have the faintest idea, not knowing how many people you would feed with a normal one, and since then I've liked omelettes even less. My Nan occasionally makes a Spanish omelette, which I quite like, but I don't count that...

But, due to some unforseen dental work, my plan to make spinach and feta macaroni cheese again didn't quite materialise and I suddenly found myself with only 1 dinner before I make a visit home for the weekend, and half a block of feta and half a bag of spinach to use up.

After some feverish reworking of my macaroni cheese recipe to try and fit it all in I concluded that it probably wouldn't work all that well. But I needed to use it up.

Here, my friend over at lovefoodthinkcook came to my rescue, extolling the virtues of frittatas. I got to wondering... would spinach and feta work? Also, would I like it?

I actually spent all of today and a good chunk of last night really looking forward to cooking my first frittata/omeletty-thing, which is possibly a little bit sad but hey-ho, I enjoy my cooking a lot now. I most certainly wasn't disappointed! I wolfed it down and have half left for a late lunch tomorrow, and I think this is one of those staple recipes that I will be going back to again and again, especially for using up leftover ingredients. It's a good thing free-range eggs are crazily cheap here in Oxford!

"Oh no, everything needs to be used up!" Spinach and Feta Frittata


My friend over at lovefoodthinkcook has a good overview of the basic frittata recipe here, but I'm the kind of girl that likes a fairly specific recipe, so I followed one by Jamie Oliver here, with a few tweaks that I'll put below.


1 small onion (I only tend to have white ones lying around so used that, original recipe says half a red one)
Fry light* or 1 teaspoon olive oil
150g fresh spinach
4 large eggs
75-100g crumbled feta cheese
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste (I have a cheap 30p shaker from Tesco. It works.)

1. Peel and finely slice the onion.

2. Preheat your grill to high**.

3. Pour enough oil into a small 7 to 8 inch ovenproof non-stick frying pan to very lightly coat the bottom (about 1 teaspoon) and put over a medium heat. If using fry light instead, a few sprays to coat the bottom of the pan works fine.

4. Add the onion and cook until just starting to brown. Add the spinach and toss for a minute or two to heat through, then remove from the heat and allow the vegetables to cool slightly.

5. Beat the eggs in a bowl. Add in the cooled spinach and red onion, followed by the feta (I crumbled it into fairly large chunks) and a good pinch of pepper.

6. Put your pan back on a medium heat and pour in the eggs. Stir around gently with a spatula until you feel the egg start to set at the bottom, then straight away, turn the heat off so the frittata stays half cooked and quite runny.

7. Carefully place your frying pan under the grill for 2 to 3 minutes (this is what the recipe said, I needed 5 plus), or until the frittata is golden and cooked through (check the center with a fork.) Put a plate over the pan and turn over quickly but carefully – the frittata should come right out (I stupidly cut it up in the pan and scratched it... sob). Serve hot or cold.

* If you haven't heard of it, Fry light is basically sunflower oil in spray form. Each spray is only 1 calorie and I have yet to find something I can't fry in it. Makes the frying process a lot healthier - I love it and don't even own any vegetable oil at the moment (something that does occasionally stop me from making certain cakes)


** The original recipe doesn't say grill, it says broiler. I still have no firm idea what that is - I think it's basically an American word for what we Brits call a grill -  just some sort of top down heating doohicky. But don't quote me on that. The grill worked absolutely fine. I guess if you didn't have a grill, if you turned the heat down on the hob after a while then you would cook through...