If the comments about this dish on Smitten Kitchen (the excellent food blog from which I got the recipe) are anything to go by, the origins of this dish are up for debate. Suffice it to say, there is general agreement that it comes from somewhere in the Middle East. My roommate, who spent last semester teaching in Egypt, says he definitely ate it there. The one thing that I think everybody can agree on is that it is delicious.
This dish (recipe here) became one of my standby dishes when I lived in Sarajevo, because most of the ingredients were easily available, it's incredibly cheap to make, and it's incredibly easy to prepare. Also, it's perfect for company, because it seems much more difficult and impressive than it is, so it looks nice enough to serve to guests, but if you've had a busy day you don't have to spend hours on it.
Tonight, it was the first dinner I served to my brother and his girlfriend who came to visit me in my brand new New York apartment. To prepare shakshuka you make a delicious sauce of garlic, onions, chilis (you can substitute bell peppers for the anaheim or jalapeno peppers called for in the Smitten Kitchen version if you don't like heat, or if you can't find chilis, for example, because you live in Sarajevo. If you want the heat but don't have the chilis you can add a bit of cayenne or substitute spicy paprika for sweet.) and tomatoes. You then poach eggs in this deliciousness. It's ideal if the yolks are runny, but let me say that I, being a general failure at runny yolks, often overcook the eggs, and it still tastes fine to me. Apparently, in some parts of Egypt at least, they use scrambled eggs and add them to the sauce later. I have never tried this, but it sounds just as delicious as the version I have had. At the end, you can add feta (or, probably more traditionally, halumi) to it. Sometimes, instead of thinning the tomato and onion mixture with water, I do it with wine for what is an absolutely delicious, and I'm sure completely inauthentic, version. Tonight, I served it with a baguette from the little French bakery down the street, and with Apothic Red wine, which is my current favorite affordable red. 10.99 a bottle here in NYC, and it's so good, I wish I could just consume it by the bottle, rather than the glass. I've also eaten it with Somun in Bosnia, with pita, with no bread at all, and once I added some brown rice to soak up all the delicious sauce. All of it was yummy.
Give this recipe a try next time you don't have a ton of time, and can't stand the thought of another frozen meal. I guarantee you won't regret it, and it won't break the bank.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Where am I?!? How did I get here?!?
Welcome new readers! I don't really know how to kick this whole thing off, so this is just a short introduction to what this blog is and how it came about.
This blog is the outcome of multiple years worth of requests and suggestions from friends and some family members that I write a food blog. I've gone from surprised that anybody would care what I had to say about anything, to flattered but resistant, and finally I have decided to give it a try. Like most of you, I spend a lot of my time eating, usually as often as twice or three times a day! Possibly unlike many of you, I also spend a lot of my free time cooking, planning what I'm going to eat, learning about different types of food, discovering new restaurants, etc. Apparently, some people in my life think that the things that I have to say about all of these processes are interesting, and worth reading about. I don't know if that's true. Frankly, I finally decided to create this blog because writing about something fun and satisfying and soul-feeding seemed like a good hobby to develop as I embark on a lifelong study of violence and atrocity.
Part of my initial resistance to starting a blog about food, as that there are a million such blogs in the world, many of which are shockingly good. I'm not a chef, so a blog entirely devoted to recipes seemed like a bit of a stretch, but including some recipes seemed like a nice idea since sometimes I cook some cool stuff. I'm also not a food critic, and I don't have the money to eat out all the time in New York City, so restaurant reviews also seemed a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, I have a mini-reputation for discovering delicious, interesting places to eat, and I thought some of those would be good to share. I also thought the idea of how to eat when you're a grad student on a limited, fixed income was kind of interesting to write about. I know from my high school English class, however, that a blog, like any good story (because really, isn't a blog just an ongoing story?) needs to have a clear premise, so just jumbling together a bunch of posts about food would quickly lose any sense of premise and devolve into disorganization. This blog is a compromise of this jumble of ideas.
This will be a blog about what is for dinner. Each day...well...no promises...MOST days, I will write an entry about what I (and my partners in crime) ate for dinner. If we ate out, I'll review the restaurant, tell you about the food, recommend it or not. If we cooked, I'll include recipes, links, notes and reviews of the outcome. But Megan, I hear you saying, what if you aren't feeling well and put yourself to bed with nothing but crackers?!?! Thank you for asking! The nice thing about having travelled as much as I have the last few years, and having resisted creating a food blog for so long is that I have a huge list of cool things I have eaten in cool places just hanging out in my brain. Some of them even have good stories behind them. So, on particularly boring days, I will do What's for Dinner Flashbacks. I promise in advance to tell you about the best bakery in Barcelona, and the only place to get proper Somun in Sarajevo.
I want to say up front that I have no idea whether this is a good idea or whether it will work. I don't know if you will find these musings interesting or not. I don't know for sure whether I will be disciplined enough to keep up, but I'm going to give it a try, and I hope you'll give it a try along with me. I also hope that, along the way, you'll give me feedback on whether you're enjoying the ride or not. Since at this moment I have zero readers and zero posts, there is nowhere to go from here but up. So, welcome, and enjoy the meals!
This blog is the outcome of multiple years worth of requests and suggestions from friends and some family members that I write a food blog. I've gone from surprised that anybody would care what I had to say about anything, to flattered but resistant, and finally I have decided to give it a try. Like most of you, I spend a lot of my time eating, usually as often as twice or three times a day! Possibly unlike many of you, I also spend a lot of my free time cooking, planning what I'm going to eat, learning about different types of food, discovering new restaurants, etc. Apparently, some people in my life think that the things that I have to say about all of these processes are interesting, and worth reading about. I don't know if that's true. Frankly, I finally decided to create this blog because writing about something fun and satisfying and soul-feeding seemed like a good hobby to develop as I embark on a lifelong study of violence and atrocity.
Part of my initial resistance to starting a blog about food, as that there are a million such blogs in the world, many of which are shockingly good. I'm not a chef, so a blog entirely devoted to recipes seemed like a bit of a stretch, but including some recipes seemed like a nice idea since sometimes I cook some cool stuff. I'm also not a food critic, and I don't have the money to eat out all the time in New York City, so restaurant reviews also seemed a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, I have a mini-reputation for discovering delicious, interesting places to eat, and I thought some of those would be good to share. I also thought the idea of how to eat when you're a grad student on a limited, fixed income was kind of interesting to write about. I know from my high school English class, however, that a blog, like any good story (because really, isn't a blog just an ongoing story?) needs to have a clear premise, so just jumbling together a bunch of posts about food would quickly lose any sense of premise and devolve into disorganization. This blog is a compromise of this jumble of ideas.
This will be a blog about what is for dinner. Each day...well...no promises...MOST days, I will write an entry about what I (and my partners in crime) ate for dinner. If we ate out, I'll review the restaurant, tell you about the food, recommend it or not. If we cooked, I'll include recipes, links, notes and reviews of the outcome. But Megan, I hear you saying, what if you aren't feeling well and put yourself to bed with nothing but crackers?!?! Thank you for asking! The nice thing about having travelled as much as I have the last few years, and having resisted creating a food blog for so long is that I have a huge list of cool things I have eaten in cool places just hanging out in my brain. Some of them even have good stories behind them. So, on particularly boring days, I will do What's for Dinner Flashbacks. I promise in advance to tell you about the best bakery in Barcelona, and the only place to get proper Somun in Sarajevo.
I want to say up front that I have no idea whether this is a good idea or whether it will work. I don't know if you will find these musings interesting or not. I don't know for sure whether I will be disciplined enough to keep up, but I'm going to give it a try, and I hope you'll give it a try along with me. I also hope that, along the way, you'll give me feedback on whether you're enjoying the ride or not. Since at this moment I have zero readers and zero posts, there is nowhere to go from here but up. So, welcome, and enjoy the meals!
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