Did Somebody Say “Gesundheit”? What’s cooking? Shakshuka with Goat Cheese and Broccoli Rabe

While working on this dish, I started thinking about how many cloves of garlic I’ve chopped in my life. Surely thousands. And yet I’m not significantly better at it than ever. Not like those chefs who ninja their garlic in nanoseconds and turn out perfectly even, teeny-tiny dice. I watched a video posted by one of my food blogger friends, and it was truly impressive. I’m not going to give you the link because it would make me look bad, and that’s not what this blog is for. This blog is for making me look GOOD.

On the other hand, I heard Ruth Reichl (former editor of Gourmet) speak not long ago about her new cookbook, and she says she’s never had a cooking lesson, so her knife skills are hopeless. My kind of woman.

So in the run-up to Thanksgiving, we all need to be conserving our strength for the Herculean tasks to come. And as usual, the Kitchen Goddess is working on a few nice side dishes for you that will make veggies the star of the show. But in the meantime,...

Shakshuka! Sounds like someone sneezed, doesn’t it? Instead, it’s a terrific dish for a Sunday night supper or when you just want something straightforward that doesn’t dirty a bunch of bowls/pans. Conceptually, it’s a lot like a frittata in the sense that you can pump it up with whatever veggies you’ve got on hand, add some cheese, change the herbs, toss in some olives, etc. And it’s quite good reheated the next day for lunch.

At its most basic, shakshuka (also spelled shakshouka) is a dish of eggs poached in tomato sauce with onions, peppers, paprika, and cumin. It’s a staple of North African cuisines – Libyan, Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and Egyptian – where it’s often served for breakfast; but it’s sufficiently hearty, especially with the various additions, that it’s also served at the evening meal, especially in winter. According to Wikipedia (who else?), shakshuka is also popular in Israel, where it was introduced by Tunisian Jews who immigrated there in the 1950s; and it’s strikingly similar to the Turkish dish, menemen.

So here’s the version the Kitchen Goddess served this week. What I liked most about it is the way the sweetness of the caramelized onions and peppers balanced with the bitterness of the broccoli rabe and the goat cheese. And my hubby sneaked a second helping when I wasn’t looking. So try mine or see what’s in your fridge that’ll make it your own.

Kitchen Goddess note: Broccoli rabe – pronounced rahb – is a relatively bitter green, more popular in Italy than the U.S., but it has gained popularity over the last few years. Its use in France goes back to the 16th century. As you might expect, it’s packed with vitamins and cancer-fighting agents. It’s also a good source of protein, and one of the best sources of vitamin K, which protects against osteoporosis. 

This is a “saucy” dish, so you’ll want to serve it with something to sop up the juices – a crusty sourdough, pita, and naan all come to mind. It’s a one-dish meal, so you won’t need anything else.

Shakshuka with Goat Cheese and Broccoli Rabe

Adapted from Melissa Clark in The New York Times.

Serves 4.

Ingredients

Broccoli rabe

1 bunch broccoli rabe (also known as rapini)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 large red bell pepper, halved, seeded, and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1-2 teaspoons minced garlic
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon sweet paprika (option: smoky paprika or a combination)
½ teaspoon Aleppo pepper (or ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper)
1 28-ounce can of whole plum tomatoes, with juice, coarsely chopped [Kitchen Goddess note: You can chop the tomatoes before adding them to the skillet, or add them to the skillet and chop them there, or use a potato masher on them. Or buy canned chopped tomatoes. The KG likes her tomatoes to be less uniformly chopped, but then you knew she would.]
4 ounces fresh goat cheese, crumbled
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 large eggs
Optional garnishes: chopped Italian parsley and chopped cilantro, hot sauce

Mise en place -- this recipe is a lot easier if you have everything ready.

Directions
Bring a pot of well-salted water to a boil and drop in your broccoli rabe for 5 minutes. Drain it well and chop it into pieces about an inch long. Reserve.

Preheat the oven to 375º.

Put a large, oven-proof skillet over medium/medium-low heat and add the olive oil. Add the onion and bell pepper and cook, stirring frequently, about 15 minutes. You want the vegetables to soften, and for the onions to get golden, not brown. Stir in the tomato paste and the garlic, and continue to cook, stirring, another minute. Add the cumin, paprika, and Aleppo pepper, and continue to cook, stirring, another minute.

Stir in the chopped tomatoes with their juices. Simmer the mixture for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until tomatoes have thickened. Add the crumbled goat cheese and stir. (It’s okay if the goat cheese isn’t thoroughly mixed. Mix it as much as you’d like.) Taste the sauce for seasoning.

With a spoon, hollow out a small area in the sauce, about an inch from the edge of the skilllet, and crack an egg into it. Do the same with the remaining eggs, spacing the eggs evenly around the skillet. Season the eggs lightly with salt and pepper.

Transfer the skillet to the oven and cook at 375º for 7-9 minutes, depending on how runny you like your eggs. Sprinkle with parsley and cilantro.

Oops! I forgot the parsley and cilantro. Ah, well...

Serve with hot sauce and some type of bread. The Kitchen Goddess recommends crusty sourdough, naan, or other flatbread.

Fun, Fast, and Foolproof Mother’s Day Breakfast What’s Cooking? Paris Breakfast

Today’s recipe is for all you dads and hubbies trying to figure out how to either make her a great breakfast yourself, or to help the kids make one in a way that doesn’t turn the kitchen into a war zone.

I remember having a few of those made for me, and frankly, it doesn’t really matter what you serve because she will eat it all and exclaim about its deliciousness. Won’t we, ladies? Because it’s the giving, not the gift, that counts.

The Mother’s Day that stands out most clearly in my mind is the year when my first-born was about 2½. I was home on maternity leave after the birth of number 2, so you know already I was totally hormonal. It was the Friday before Mother’s Day, and our sitter had gone to pick up number 1 from nursery school, which he had been attending for only a few months. She parked her car on a side street across from our house, and I watched from an upstairs window as she held his hand to cross the street and climb the steep driveway to our home. Then I noticed he had something in his other hand. A piece of paper – some sort of artwork. I caught my breath as, in a flash, it came to me that he’d made me a Mother’s Day card. He had no idea what it meant for there to be something called Mother’s Day, but if they were making something for their moms, well, by golly, he could do that.

Innocence and pure unadulterated love are the remarkable gifts we get from our children, and that I was now the guardian of that innocence and the recipient of that love had not struck me with any great force until that moment. So I was a complete mess by the time they entered the house, but I welcomed the card with as much joy and graciousness as I could muster through the tears that wouldn’t stop flowing down my cheeks.

* * *

This breakfast dish is one you’ll love any day, Mother’s Day or not. I don’t know why it’s called Paris Breakfast – it’s from an ancient cookbook issue of my hometown local newspaper, and the friend of my mother’s who contributed it has long ago passed on to that great Kitchen in the sky. I posted it several years ago, as a Happy New Year’s Day breakfast, but without a photo. (New Year’s Day being the wrong time entirely to ask me to get out my camera.) This time, you can see for yourself that it looks delicious, and I promise you, it delivers on the look. I don’t think anyone has ever made it for me, but one of my sons claims it’s his favorite breakfast treat when I make it for him. And am I happy to make it for him? You bet.

Amazingly, the dish takes less than 30 minutes from start to finish. Also, because you concoct the whole thing in the blender – that’s right, in your blender! – it’s actually fun to make. The key is in the timing: you want to have the pie pan hot from the oven and the blender mixture well blended, simultaneously. So on the last blending cycle, you should actually be removing the pie pan from the oven while the blending is going on. The beautiful puff that develops in the oven will disappear almost immediately when you remove the pan, but that’s just the way it goes.

Paris Breakfast

Serves 2.

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large eggs
½ cup milk (whole, skim or part-skim – your choice), at room temperature (I microwaved mine for 15 seconds to get it there)
1 tablespoon Grand Marnier (or Cointreau or any other orange-flavored liqueur)
2 tablespoons sugar
Juice of one lemon (about 3 tablespoons)
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup all-purpose flour
Confectioner’s sugar, for dusting

Special equipment: a 10-inch glass pie plate.

Preheat oven to 400º. [Kitchen Goddess note: This is one of those recipes in which mise en place is critical. So stop reading now and go get all your ingredients measured out and ready. Then come back.]

Put the butter in a 10-inch glass pie plate and put
the pie plate into the hot oven. Once the butter has melted (about 4 minutes), brush it around the sides and bottom of the pie plate, and return it to the oven.

Ready to pour.

Put the eggs, milk, orange liqueur, sugar, lemon juice, and salt into a blender and blend briefly (about 5 seconds). Add the flour and blend again until frothy (another 25-30 seconds).





Scrape down the sides of the blender and run the blender again while you – carefully! – remove the hot pie plate from the oven. The butter will have begun to brown at this point. Working quickly (but still carefully), pour the mixture into the plate and bake 15 minutes.

On the way into the oven.

Remove the finished product from the oven and dust with confectioner’s sugar. Serve with crisp bacon or fruit (or both) and your favorite jam or syrup.

The Kitchen Goddess wishes you a very happy Mother’s Day!

Doing the Veggie Shuttle What’s cooking? Fall Harvest Frittata

So I hope you all didn’t think I’d fallen off the roof or something. I had an unexpected trip back to New Jersey last week, and it completely threw me off course. The good news is that I took advantage of the occasion to make one final visit to the farmers’ market there, and loaded up completely.

A couple of weeks before that in Texas, I met a woman – another foodie – who used to live in Brooklyn. We got to chatting about the wonderfulness (and yes, I know that’s not a word) of the New Jersey/New York farmers’ markets. She told me she always takes an empty suitcase on return trips so she can stock up on her favorite foods. What a great idea. And while I didn’t take an extra suitcase, I did pack as efficiently as I could to allow room for a few items to help me extend the season.

Gimme a Break – Fast Food for Tax Time What’s cooking? Corn and Tomato Frittata

I’m working on my taxes. Yes, it’s September, but that’s how long it takes me to (a) get my butt in the chair with the necessary papers in hand; and (b) when the butt is in the chair to get the accounting done in lieu of another game of Spider Solitaire. Here’s another thing that happens:

I’m moving through my AmEx statements looking for records of business deductions and charitable donations, when my husband says he wants to use the dryer and can he take my laundry out of it. I want to get the permanent press shirts hung up quickly, so I leave my desk, coffee cup in hand, and go to the laundry room, where I start hanging up shirts and folding clothes. Halfway through, I notice that the coffee cup is empty, so I go to the kitchen to refill.

Eggs-actly

I was single and living in New York when I bought my first cookbook. Unlike Nora Ephron, I didn’t get mine from my mother. When I left home in Texas, the only things I could actually cook – i.e., using heat – were hard-boiled eggs and canned soup. Among cold dishes, I could also make tuna salad. I approached kitchen life with all the enthusiasm of a Christian in the Coliseum.

But I was newly employed and living in Manhattan, and hard-boiled eggs and canned soup doth not a life make. And I really missed scrambled eggs. I couldn’t bear to call my mother for advice: she thought the stories of my incompetence in the kitchen were the stuff of stand-up comedy and worthy fodder for the neighborhood coffee klatch. My dad also cooked a lot of eggs, but my brother and I had always referred to the result as “flat eggs.” Not too appetizing, and certainly not anything I was eager to replicate. So I called my aunt, trusting that she’d be discreet and that the resulting scrambled eggs would be fluffy. She explained the process carefully, even as to how much was “a little” milk. (Though these days, I use water, to better effect.) I followed her instructions to the letter, and, lo and behold: scrambled eggs. I was joyous, triumphant, even – dare I say it? – egg-static.       

I’m a lot more comfortable with eggs these days, but whenever I make a dish that’s heavily egg-oriented, I remember those days and the joy of my own scrambled eggs.

So last night was one of those nights when I needed to pull dinner together quickly, and for speed, economy, and nutrition, there’s nothing like a frittata. They’re delicious, too, and the variations are endless. You can follow the gist of the instructions below, substituting your own selection of veggies, including mushrooms, and use whatever cheese strikes your fancy.              

Thursday Frittata (serves 2, with leftovers)

2 Tbl extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 zucchini, cut into 1/2-inch dice
1 yellow squash, cut into 1/2-inch dice
1 red bell pepper, cut into 1/2-inch dice
6 eggs
1 Tbl dried oregano
pinch of cayenne pepper
salt and pepper to taste
3/4 c shredded Cheddar cheese

Preheat the broiler. Heat the oil in a large oven-proof skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté the onion for about 5 mins, then add the garlic and sauté 1 min more. (Kitchen Goddess tip: Don't burn the garlic; burnt garlic tastes bitter.) Add the other vegetables, stirring to combine well with the onion and garlic and olive oil. Reduce the heat to medium, cover the pan, and cook until the vegetables are crisp-tender, about 5-7 mins.

While the veggies cook, whisk together the eggs, oregano, cayenne, and salt/pepper in a separate bowl. When the veggies are ready, spread them evenly around the skillet, and pour the egg mix over them. Cover and continue to cook over medium-low heat for 8 mins, or until the eggs are set around the edges and almost set in the center. Remove the lid, sprinkle the cheese over all, and place the skillet under the broiler. Cook until the cheese is bubbling and the eggs are completely set, about 2 mins. Cut into wedges and serve with fruit or a salad and a crusty bread.