Bacon and Asparagus Frittata

The Overdrive column is official. I signed the agreement this week — six columns a year about truck cooking, recipes and tips for drivers who want to eat real food on the road instead of gas station hot dogs and vending machine dinners. They are paying me, which is not much, but it is money for writing, which still feels like a magic trick. Someone will pay me to describe how to make chili in a slow cooker while hauling frozen beef across Nebraska. The world is strange and I am grateful for the strangeness.

My first column is due in August. I am writing about the setup — the 12-volt slow cooker, the portable burner, the mini fridge, the way you organize a truck cab into a kitchen when the truck cab is also your bedroom and your office and your living room. Twenty-one years of truck cooking distilled into eight hundred words. It feels like compression. It feels like taking a life and squeezing it through a funnel. But the funnel is the point — the readers do not need my life, they need my recipes, and the life is the seasoning, not the main course.

I took the kids to the Grand Island public pool on Wednesday. The pool is where Grand Island children go in July because there is nowhere else to go in July, and the pool smells like chlorine and sunscreen and the specific chaos of two hundred children in water, which is the smell of summer in a landlocked state. Josie can swim now — really swim, not the dog-paddling she was doing last year. Justin did a cannonball off the diving board that displaced enough water to lower the pool level. Tyler sat in the shallow end and talked to a girl, which is new and which I pretended not to notice because twelve-year-old boys do not want their mothers noticing girls.

I made BLTs for dinner — thick-cut bacon, garden tomatoes from the neighbor's surplus (everyone in Nebraska has surplus tomatoes in July; they leave them on your porch like offerings to appease the gods of produce), lettuce, mayo, white bread. A BLT with a good tomato does not need improvement. A BLT with a bad tomato needs therapy. The tomatoes were good. The dinner was perfect. We ate on the porch and the tomato juice ran down our arms and nobody cared.

That BLT dinner reminded me how far a good piece of bacon can carry a meal — no fuss, no fanfare, just the right ingredient doing exactly what it is supposed to do. The next night I still had bacon in the fridge and asparagus that needed using, and this frittata is what happened: a skillet meal that has that same porch-dinner energy, the kind where you eat while it’s still light outside and everybody gets seconds without asking. If your summer is full of good produce and hungry kids who just came home from the pool, this is the recipe for it.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes | Total Time: 30 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

6 large eggs
1/4 cup whole milk
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
6 strips thick-cut bacon, cooked and crumbled
1 cup fresh asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 green onions, thinly sliced

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Cook the bacon in a 10-inch oven-safe skillet over medium heat until crispy. Transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate, let cool slightly, then crumble. Drain all but about 1 teaspoon of the bacon drippings from the skillet.
Whisk the eggs. In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper until smooth and well combined. Set aside.
Cook the asparagus. Add the olive oil to the skillet over medium heat. Add the asparagus pieces and cook, stirring occasionally, for 3 to 4 minutes until just tender and bright green.
Add the bacon and egg mixture. Scatter the crumbled bacon evenly over the asparagus. Pour the egg mixture over the top, tilting the pan gently to distribute. Let it cook undisturbed on the stovetop for 2 to 3 minutes, until the edges just begin to set.
Top and bake. Sprinkle the shredded cheddar and sliced green onions evenly over the top. Transfer the skillet to the preheated oven and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the center is set and the top is lightly golden.
Rest and serve. Remove from the oven and let the frittata rest in the pan for 5 minutes before slicing into wedges. Serve warm, straight from the skillet.

Nutrition (per serving)

Bacon and Asparagus Frittata — Because Bacon Deserves More Than One Night on the Porch