Friday, June 28, 2013

Shakshouka, the wildcard dish.

Today I prepared another very Israeli dish: shakshouka. 

(Disclaimer: Again, when I mean Israeli I mean as in 'frequently consumed by Israelis'. Shakshouka is believed to be from Tunisia, according to its wikipedia entry.)

Shakshouka is a dished that is based on tomatoes, eggs, peppers, onions and spices. It is very simple to make, and also extremely delicious. 

Now, why is shakshouka so awesome? Well, there's multiple reasons. As I mentioned earlier, it is super easy to make. Secondly, as the title of the post suggests, the dish is a wildcard. You can insert it into any meal of the day and it works well. It's eaten here as breakfast, lunch and even (light) dinner. Thirdly, it is vegetarian, pareve (i.e. not dairy or meaty) and gluten-free. That is to say, it can be eaten with anything (and even during Passover) and it will probably please most of your diners (unless your diners are vegans or allergic to eggs). 

The recipe can be found here. So, the one I made doesn't look as awesome and I didn't have a lot of fancy spices. Actually, whenever I see something like that on a recipe I just think of it as 'optional'. Or replace the expression 'olive oil' by 'whatever oil I have bought'.

But nonetheless here are some picture of the process and the result. 
This is what the veggie mix looks like. It's in the process of cooking. 

That thing on the side is breaded eggplant. That was last weeks find.

This is the finished dish. We just served ourselves straight from the pan. I think that is how you do it.
This was a bit of what the finished dish looked like. There was plenty more of each, and I had seconds of everything.
Thus far I have to admit that I am very impressed about the quality of my cooking. This is becoming a very rewarding and pleasant experience. I will try my best to take these lessons with me back to Boston. 

Until the next post.






2 comments:

  1. It might be a wildcard dish, but it most certainly looks tasty!! How much preparation time did this "Shakshouka" take you? Awesome food!

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    1. So it's a bit hard to estimate because I was also doing the breaded eggplant simultaneously. Like frying the onions and tomatoes (in that order) takes a combined time of about 12 minutes, and then cooking the eggs takes about 12-15 depending on how cooked you want them. In addition, preparation (chopping the vegetables, getting things together, warming up the pan) time might be around 5-10 minutes. So, a total of 40 minutes or so.

      The drawback is that it is hard to store once the eggs are cooked, so you should really look at the proportions before starting.

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