Monday, November 25, 2013

Poached Eggs Shakshuka with Zucchini
 also good with summer squash or eggplant

poached eggs shakshuka with zucchini

Without further ado, here is egg shakshuka alla Poppy with zucchini added to stretch it out to four servings, one to eat right away, and three to put away in jars for work.

I alternate between hungarian hots and jalapenos and rotate between zucchini, summer squash, and eggplant on my grocery orders, which makes for different combinations, e.g., zucchini and hungarian hots, summer squash and jalapenos, eggplant and hungarian hots, zucchini and jalapeno WHAT. Super exciting, I know.

olive oil
3 hungarian hot peppers
   or jalapeno peppers
1 onion
2 zucchini
   or summer squash
   or eggplant
5 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon paprika
1 large can tomatoes
eggs
avocado
feta

Heat oil in a saute pan over low heat. Dice the peppers, onions, and zucchini, adding them to the pan as they're diced and turning up the heat as more vegetables are added to the pan. Stir occasionally. Add garlic, cumin, and paprika, turn up the heat to medium high if it isn't already and saute until all is golden, about two more minutes.

Fish out the tomatoes from the can and run a knife through them to roughly chop, and add the chopped tomatoes and any liquid to the pan. Reduce heat to medium and simmer until thickened slightly, about 15 minutes.

(I did ask myself, why get canned whole tomatoes just to chop them, when you can just get canned crushed tomatoes, and found that canned crushed tomatoes are not as ...whole-tasting as whole tomatoes. Like, they're thicker-tasting. So I like whole tomatoes even though the above is kind of a mess, YMMV. Smitten Kitchen has you crush the tomatoes with your fingers in a bowl, but I have a fairly serious block about dirtying an extra bowl when the cutting board is already out. I did try freestyle crushing the tomatoes, man, those things squirt far.)

At this point I cook two eggs to eat right away, I crack two eggs in a corner of the pan and let them cook covered for five minutes. Then I fish them out and spoon a little more sauce over them, I've diced an avocado and top the eggs with that and some feta.

The rest of the sauce gets put into jars for work breakfasts:

tomato zucchini shakshuka jars

At work, I empty a jar of sauce into a covered Pyrex bowl and microwave it for 2 minutes on high. Remember last year I couldn't quite get poached eggs right in the microwave? First, Ruth tipped me off about the covered Pyrex bowl. Then I figured out, I was making wells in the sauce for the eggs to cook in and that's not how they do. The way to do it is to crack the eggs on top of the sauce, cover the bowl, and then they cook right up in 2-3 minutes depending on your microwave and how done you like your eggs. Top with diced avocado and feta.