Sausage, Sweet Potato and Caramelized Onion Frittata

This weekend I laid down a lot of credit to purchase some new furniture for my bedrooms. Feeling the pinch immediately upon arriving home and having a slight case of buyer’s remorse (but not enough to cancel my purchase), I began thinking of ways I can scrimp and save until I pay off the furniture that hasn’t arrived yet. Slight decrease my 401K to make my paycheck higher? Check. Stop eating out (as if I do this a ton)? Check. Spend less on groceries?

Bummer. I supposed I could try check-marking that one. I mean I do spend an awful lot on groceries, but that’s mainly when I’m trying to eat more healthy so it seems justified. Right? I took a look around my fridge and glanced over at my kitchen cart scanning for ingredients to put something together with my existing foods. Then I took to Pinterest for some inspo and found a recipe to use up the rest of the chicken breakfast sausage I have in my fridge, one of my sweet potatoes, loads of eggs and one of two onions in my pantry. My recipe is based off one found at paleorunningmama.com.

What’s magical about this dish is that (if I used myfitnesspal app correctly), each slice is only 245 calories. On the downside, after I ate one piece I felt like I could have had two more. But I’m experiencing some weird hunger phenomenon the last week or so, so that didn’t really surprise me.

ingredients.

1 small sweet potato, or half of a large one
1 large yellow onion
¼ lb sausage, cooked (I had leftover chicken breakfast sausage that I used; I measured the amount after the sausage was cooked)
¼ c. butter
1 T. olive oil (or cooking fat of choice) for the sweet potatoes
¼ tsp. salt
5 eggs
4 cloves of minced garlic
½ tsp. paprika
sea salt and coarse black pepper, to taste

directions.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Grease a 9 inch pie plate or baking dish. Wash your sweet potato and chop off the ends. Slice it into very thin rounds using a mandolin if you have one to make sure the slices are even. Place the rounds onto the bottom. Brush with olive oil and pop into the oven to cook your crust while your onions are caramelizing. Note: you can place sweet potato rounds along the sides of your pie dish but they’ll shrink down to the bottom of the pan while roasting, so … you can save yourself a step in the beginning and only layer the bottom of the dish.
First caramelize the onions. Melt ¼ cup of butter in a medium saute pan over med-low heat. Cut the onion into quarters and then slice very thin and evenly. Add the onions to the pan and toss with the butter to coat. You will stir every once in a while to make sure they cook evenly. They will cook for about 30 minutes.Don’t forget to stir the onions! After the onions have been cooking 10 minutes, stir in the ¼ tsp salt and continue to cook over med-low heat.
Once the sweet potatoes are starting to brown and your onions are almost done, remove the pie dish from the oven.
Salt the sweet potatoes and sprinkle the paprika on top. Add the cooked sausage to the dish on top of the sweet potatoes distributing the sausage evenly.
By now the onions should be pretty caramelized – a light to medium golden brown color. Add them to the dish over the sausage. Sprinkle the minced garlic over the onions.
In a large bowl, whisk the eggs until uniform. Pour the egg over the onions, sausage and sweet potatoes. Allow the eggs to spread around so it covers everything. It will look like there’s not quite enough egg in there but trust me, there is.
Bake in the preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until the eggs are set and the frittata is bubbly. Remove from oven and let it sit for at least 10 minutes before cutting and serving.

The only thing I wished had turned out different is that the crust was kind of mushy. I thought that by pre-baking the potatoes the crust would turn out … crusty. But it didn’t. I suppose I could have cooked the potatoes longer, so if you try this recipe and want a crispier crust, I would try pre-baking the crust a wee bit longer. I should note that when I put my the “crust” into the oven it was not yet preheated. So the 30-minute duration that I cooked the potatoes included the preheating part.

This is a dish that should reheat nicely, which will work well for taking it along to the office this week for breakfast! Money crunch solved. For this week, anyway.