Olympic Food Challenge: Qatar - Shakshooka

Finding a recipe that summed up Qatar for the Olympic Food Challenge proved to be tricky.  I thought I was onto a winner when I discovered that the Qatari Embassy website has a food section.  Sadly the Embassy's website is a poor indictment of Qatar's athletes who picked up two bronze medals* during the Olympic games.

Every link on the site led to a broken page and every google result took me back to the same home page via a different route.  I was ready to throw in the towel when I came across this You Tube recipe for Shakshooka.  Until that point I had never come across shakshooka but it turns out that it is not all that uncommon a dish.  It seems to stem out of North Africa and has moved from country to country with every nation taking on their own twist.

With that in mind I decided to stray away from the video and come up with my own variation based on the many recipes that I found and what I happened to have in the house.  I started as per the video instructions with sliced onion and immediately veered off course with half a chopped pepper.  I was back on track with some fresh chopped plum tomatoes**.  The vegetables bubbled away, softened and collapsed into a sauce over a low heat. 

According to the You Tube recipe the eggs are mixed into the cooked sauce to create a tomatoey scrambled egg mixture.  Again, I decided to ignore the recipe.  I added a handful of spinach to the sauce to wilt and then broke a couple of eggs into wells in the mixture to cook.  The only addition was some salt and pepper and a nice breakfast/lunch dish was born.

*Mutaz Essa Barshim in the men's high jump and Nasser Al-attiyah in the men's skeet.
**I have no problem with tinned tomatoes but while they are in season I love fresh tomatoes.

Olympic Food Challenge: Belarus - Draniki

I've not really been on top of Tonight's Menu since the end of the Olympic Food Challenge.  I put that down to a number of factors.  Firstly, no sooner had the challenge ended than we went on holiday.  I try not to blog on holiday, it's hardly social and possibly rude to lock myself away and type whilst visiting family.  Secondly, since returning to Leeds, we have mostly been eating leftovers and not cooking.  This does not make for good reading.

Thirdly and the saddest reason of them all, the Olympic Food Challenge remains unfinished.  The other bloggers involved and I all cooked like demons, but real life got in the way and so around forty countries remain uncooked.  In the last week I have reallocated the outstanding nations and the challenge is now back on.  We are now aiming to complete the set by the end of the Paralympics.

To get the ball rolling I discovered a Belarusian potato pancake that just had "eat me when hungover" written all over it.  Draniki is made with a mixture of seasoned grated potato and egg which is then fried and served.  Sounds great.  It wasn't.  Either my potatoes were the wrong type or I'm just not keen on draniki.  The grating, using the small side of the grater as shown on the instructions, left me with what can best be described as potato slurry.  Adding an egg didn't help matters nor did the instruction to drain the potato water which came after the instruction to add the egg.

The resulting batter did fry well.  As with all pancakes, the first few were not quite right and the last ones were a little burnt due to the variances in pan heat.  Unlike normal pancakes these were not yummy.  The potato didn't cook through and they remained watery.  Grating an onion didn't help my hangover either.  Luckily, a couple of sausages and a cracking slice of bacon, all from B&J Callard's on Kirkgate Market, came to the rescue.

It was the Belarusian pair of Azarenka and Mirnyi that beat Andy Murray and Laura Robson to the Olympic Gold medal in the Tennis Mixed Doubles.  I can only imagine that they didn't start that day with a plate of draniki.  If they did then they are better athletes than I give them credit for.

Asparagus Omelette

On Sunday, with the re-discovered joy that fridge ownership had brought, we had a family outing to our nearest supermarket.  Never have a small group of people been so happy at the thought of buying fresh orange juice, milk and cheese!  We could also raid the vegetable graveyard, looking for perfectly fine and edible produce that failed the supermarket's ridiculous shelf-life policy.

There was plenty to choose from, but we limited our haul to a bag of mange tout the size of your head and two bunches of asparagus.  Now I know that neither of these foods are in season and therefore, have probably been airfreighted in from Peru or Kenya, but a bargain is a bargain and I hate to see food go to waste.

Tonight I cooked a rather large omelette for our evening meal, which we ate with a salad that Z prepared.  I wont bore you to death with how to make an omelette, James Martin does enough of that every week on Saturday Kitchen.  I will say that lighter evening meals will become more of a prominent feature here, unless we snap back to wintry conditions again.

Gammon, Egg and Chips

Just had a quick flick through the archives and found that we last had this meal on the 15th December 2011.  There are many similarities between that meal and Tonight's.  The gammon is the same product of Swillington Farm and the eggs are fried to perfection*.

For a change I decided to make my own oven chips.  It's simple enough, but takes a little longer than cooking those from the freezer.  Making your own means that you can mess about a bit.  I messed about by adding a parsnip to the potatoes.  This led to an exciting Russian roulette situation where you didn't know if the next bite would be savoury or sweet**.

*even if I do say so myself.  You need to get the frying pan and oil very hot then turn down the heat as you add the eggs.  You also need a lot more oil than you think.  If you skimp on the oil the eggs will stick.
**Don't try this if you don't like parsnip.

Gammon, Egg and Chips

Back in November, when I started this blog, I penned a post about Roast Pork Shoulder, in which I mentioned the tastiest gammon I have ever eaten.  The gammon came from Swillington Farm and it is the reason we have started buying their monthly meat boxes.

Unlike your average shop bought gammon, this was a substantial piece of cured pork that didn't shrivel to half the size during cooking, leaving behind a milky scum.  The rind crisped up like good crackling should and you could taste the pig, not just salt.  Gammon hasn't always been like this for me.

I remember family trips out for Sunday lunch to The Bowling Green Inn, Euxton, where I'd invariably choose gammon.  It's the first place where I remember getting to choose from the real menu, not the kids menu.  It was like a whole new world had been opened up to me.  To give you some idea of the era in which this epic, life changing event happened, the Bowling Green had a Pacman video game and Findus had launched the French Bread Pizza.

The most exciting topping of these superheated, jaw-breakingly crisp pizzas, was the ham and pineapple.  I know now that this is a combination that should be locked into Room 101, but back then the salty sweet combo was a winner. 

The gammon at the Bowling Green came with pineapple.  Tonight, the gammon came with a fried egg, chips and peas.