Shakshouka

This post has been in my ‘Drafts’ folder even before I left for KL, which was more than 3 weeks ago. I wish i had a better, no, an actual excuse, but I don’t. I am very sorry nonetheless! Shakshouka, for the uninitiated, is basically baked eggs (yum) in tomato sauce (yum). Somewhere in the evolution of this dish, meat was added for the carnivores. My mom has made the dish a couple of times last year. She made it again recently at the request of my cousin (I mean I didn’t exactly tell her not to either) and this time I managed to document it. There hasn’t been a ‘Mom Cooks’ post in a while, and there really should be more of those because my mom? She cooks.

A lot. My “body type” is a testament to that fact.

 

My mom actually has her own list of Malay food blogs that she religiously follows *gasp* and this recipe is from one of them. It’s cute really, she’ll be telling me about those blogs, and I’ll be telling her about the ones I follow but we both don’t really listen to each other LOL. I can barely speak Malay, mama!

 

 

 

Shakshouka adapted from here (serves 6-8)
*sauce*
500g minced beef
3 tbsp minced garlic
2 tbsp minced ginger
2 tbsp curry powder
4 tbsp chili paste
1 red onion, diced
1 tomato, diced
1 cup mixed vegetables
1 100g can tomato puree
4 tbsp tomato sauce (ketchup)
1 tbsp sugar
1-2 cups of water
salt and MSG to taste
*topping*
2 red onions, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
2 red chilies, sliced
2 green chilies, sliced
6 -8 eggs
coriander
fried shallots (optional)

 

-put the beef in a bowl, mix in the garlic, ginger and curry powder and set aside for 20 minutes.

-heat some vegetable oil in a wok and saute the onions until they are soft.
-add in the chili paste and cook until fragrant

 

-stir in the marinated beef and then add 1-2 cups of water.
-when the beef is almost cooked, stir in the tomato puree, tomato sauce, mixed vegetables and diced tomatoes.
-add in the sugar, along with the salt and MSG to taste.
-let it simmer for a while, the dish should have the consistency and texture of bolognese sauce.

 

Assembly time! You’ll need the above ingredients.

 

You can pour all the sauce into a baking dish but this one was for personal consumption. Basically, you ladle in the sauce into a large ramekin, make a hole in the middle with a spoon and crack an egg into the hole. And then you top it off with the onions, chillies and tomatoes. I actually had a fight with my mom about the coriander and fried shallots. I think they should be sprinkled after baking and my mom says they need to be sprinkled on before baking because “that’s what the recipe said!”. Well, so that’s what we did and the coriander came out burntbaked. I had to pick them out one by one and re-sprinkle the dish with fresh ones because I wanted to take more pictures and I wanted it to look pretty.

But wait! I’m getting ahead of myself. So after you’re done with the topping (with or without coriander!), bake in a preheated 350°F/180°C oven for 15 minutes, 20 if you like the eggs to fully cooked. I like mine jiggly, like my form, so 15 minutes was all it took!

 

YUM.

YUMYUMYUM.

 

We usually eat it with thick, toasted slices of baguette but my dad is the one who usually buys the bread (so tempted to add a “breadwinner” joke here) and he wasn’t home yet at this point so regular white bread it is! I didn’t even toast them, that was how hungry I was.

Make this today, folks. The list of ingredients and steps might seem a little longer than usual but it is so worth it. Or you could do what I do sometimes when I’m lemming for baked eggs over yummy sauce, use leftover bolognese. That’ll work. Oh trust me, that’ll work.

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