Zucchini and potato frittata

The frittata is the Swiss Army knife of the Italian kitchen. Leftover vegetables? Frittata. Unexpected friend on the doorstep? Frittata. Sunday picnic? Frittata. Our mother made this one every time we told her at the last minute that we were bringing friends over, because four eggs and a potato could somehow feed five people when an Italian mother was involved. We never understood the physics. We just ate.

We think the reason the frittata works so well for our family specifically is that our mother grew up with five brothers and sisters on one teacher's salary, and the frittata is a dish designed to solve exactly that problem. You take whatever is in the garden and whatever is cheapest at the market, you beat in however many eggs you can afford, and you turn it into something that tastes important. Our mother's frittata always had potato, because potatoes are filling, and zucchini, because zucchini grew in such horrifying abundance in our grandmother's garden that the family would eat them from June until November whether they wanted to or not. Occasionally a slice of salami appeared when there had been a good payday. It didn't matter. The frittata always tasted like dinner had been solved.

What follows is the version we still make today, directly inherited from our mother's kitchen with one modification: we finally learned to cook the potato properly through before the eggs go in. Her version, to be completely honest, used to have a stubborn crunch in the middle that we quietly resented for years. The key is patience at the first step; cover the pan, let the potato go tender, then turn the heat up for the zucchini, then add the eggs. Eat warm from the pan at dinner, room-temperature at a Sunday picnic, cold in a sandwich between two slices of ciabatta for lunch the next day. Always feeds more people than it should.