Our exchange student was gaga over this dish. I had never heard of it before and unfortunately, he had no real cooking skills. So, we didn’t really try this until we went to Spain last summer. It is very simple, comfort food that I made following the recipe in Canelle et Vanille for our September meeting of the Left Coast Culinary Book Club.

Eggs, potatoes, onion, salt and oil, it cant get much simpler than that. First peel and fry the potatoes and onions. The recipe called for three medium Yukon Gold potatoes. I used four shriveling, nearly rotten ones cooked in 3/4 cup of olive oil. In the mean time, scramble 6 eggs, I used 8 medium eggs.

I don’t know if this is the key or not, but after the potatoes are fried, you put them into the raw eggs and then dump the whole mixture back into the skillet. The key to the whole thing is that you need to flip the tortilla once. This is where our exchange student went wrong the couple of times that he attempted it as he never flipped it.

Aran said that you need to use a good, quality non-stick pan. Well, I dont have a good one and the truth is, I really don’t have a ‘non-stick’ (teflon coated) pan, so I used my cast iron skillet. And it worked perfectly fine.

Finding something to flip the tortilla onto was also a challenge. If I were to hazard a guess, I think this recipe would work better in a 10 inch pan rather that a 12 inch pan. My feelings are that the the over all product was too thin, but it worked just fine. I think the texture came out a little to rustic compared to the pictures I have seen (as well as real life) because of the ratio of potatoes to egg and the overall size.

We frequently make eggs and potatoes for breakfast. This combination is nothing new. I guess what is that every time I have mixed raw eggs and cooked potatoes is that the eggs seem to coat the potatoes and disappear. So, taking them out and mixing with the eggs before cooking seemed to be a better way of doing it.

End Your Programming Routine: As soon as we arrived to the dinner, the tortilla was served and nearly eaten. I would say that it was a success. Like I said, a little tweaking of the recipe could make this an easy stand-out. I say, not bad for the first time.