My time living in the Middle East had its share of ups and downs, but one of the joys was constantly learning about new foods. For a while, I was in the privileged position of reviewing restaurants in Dubai, which was a lot of fun, even after the time I was almost fired for writing a negative review about a restaurant in a hotel where the general manager was a mate of my boss. But even when I quit that job to focus on writing about cars, I was still fortunate enough to live near some amazing restaurants, from the cheap and cheerful to the five-star.
Shashuka is one of those dishes that I didn’t eat every day when I lived in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but it was a familiar sight at hotel breakfast buffets and on cafe menus. It never really occurred to me to try and make my own shashuka until a few days ago. I received an email from the BBC Good Food Middle East magazine – I can’t bear to remove myself from that mailing list and cut that particular tie with my old life. I clicked on something about Ramadan food, just in time for the Islamic holy month to start, and ended up exploring the website. I came across a recipe for shashuka and the ingredients, especially cumin and coriander, made me a bit nostalgic.
But, like many a Middle Eastern recipe, this particular shashuka was better suited to a family with a couple of kids. At the Munching Matilda South London Test Kitchen, it’s just me and my husband. So I thought I’d make a few tweaks and adjustments to the recipe to create a breakfast shashuka for two. This would require four eggs and, as luck would have it, I had four eggs left in the fridge. The rest of the shashuka centred around ingredients I happened to have in the house and I accompanied it with Turkish flatbread that I made on Friday afternoon in anticipation of doing a traditional Middle Eastern cooked breakfast for a lazy Saturday morning.
If you want to cook this for four people, double all the ingredients.
The Turkish flatbread recipe came straight from a bread-making cookbook that a neighbour was giving away for free during one of the lockdowns. I never freestyle when I make bread, so I strongly advise you look elsewhere for a Turkish bread recipe or simply buy some for the purposes of soaking up shashuka.
The shared ritual of dipping bits of bread into the eggs with runny yolks and adding lashing of vegetables straight from the frying pan is one of the true delights of a shashuka. As a bonus, it is as healthy as it is tasty.
Shashuka breakfast for two
Ingredients
For the tomato sauce
125ml passata
I tablespoon lemon juice
50g pitted, sliced black olives
For the yoghurt dressing
200ml Greek or plain yoghurt
1 tablespoon mint, either chopped fresh or dried
1 tablespoon harissa paste
For the shakshuka
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, diced
100g baby spinach leaves
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
Salt, pepper, ground cumin and ground coriander to taste
4 medium eggs
Instructions
- First, mix together the ingredients for the tomato sauce and the yoghurt dressing. Put in two bowls and set aside.
- Heat the oil in wide, shallow frying pan and add the red onion and garlic. Cook until the onion starts to soften.
- Add the spinach to the pan and cook gently until it starts to wilt.
- Add the salt, pepper, cumin and coriander to taste.
- Make two holes in the spinach mix and crack two eggs into each hole.
- Cover and cook until the whites have set and the yolks are still a bit runny.
- Spoon dollops of the tomato sauce around the pan.
- Remove from the heat, bring the pan to the table and serve with flatbread and the yoghurt dressing.