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.

Spetsofai - Sausage and Pepper Stew

We've all been there.  You buy a new cookery book, excitedly flick through the pages and get giddy about all of the new recipes you are about to try.  Then, through no fault of your own, the book makes its way onto the groaning bookshelf with all of the other books to gather dust.  For a change to tradition, Tonight's meal is the second recipe from the cookbook that Z bought me last week: Meze Cooking by Sarah Maxwell.

We cook sausage stews and casseroles quite often, usually cooking them with beans and flavouring them depending on the type of sausage.  This simple stew of slow cooked onions, peppers and sausages was wonderfully sweet and sticky.  As it was a nice evening we just had the sausages with a side salad and some garlic bread but some couscous would have been good too.

Baked Potato with Ratatouille and Goats Cheese

While making last night's risotto, Z also managed to make a ratatouille from the vegetables that were knocking about in the fridge for tonight's meal.  We always have tomatoes, onions and peppers in the house.  They turn up in so many dishes, including salads for lunch, that they have a permanent place on the shopping list.  For some reason, we also had a pair of aubergines in the crisper.  I am not a fan of the aubergine.  I have only actually found one way of cooking it that I love.  But when it is mixed in with all of the other vegetables you hardly know it's there.

With the rat in the bag, all Z had to do before I got home was bake a couple of giant spuds that I bought on Kirkgate Market.  By the time I got home from work, everything was ready, including a couple of slices of goats cheese topping off the filled potatoes.  It turns out that it is national vegetarian week this week.  If I had known in advance I may well have changed the menu for our evening meals.  I think this would still have made the cut.

Italian Pork Loin Steaks with Roasted Peppers

It's been a long day / week at work and one that I don't relish repeating any time soon.  I can hack the hours.  I can field sales calls and pretend that I'm not me or that I am not at my desk.  I can even put up with listening to the strained tunes of the Zumba classes.  But the emotional side of dealing face to face with colleges and customers has really taken its toll.  I could do with a little R'n'R.  Which is lucky because this weekend, tomorrow in fact, we are heading down south to see family.

Our first stop will be Windsor to see Z's parents.  Then we're going deeper south to Poole for a 3rd birthday party on Saturday, followed by a christening on Sunday.  Monday we'll be driving all the way back to Leeds so that I can be back at work on Tuesday.  A nice relaxing weekend indeed.

Tonight we have found time to cook and eat a nice meal of pork loin steaks, from Swillington Farm, baked on a bed of peppers and onions and served with potato wedges.  We have also packed our bags and piled them all in the hall so that we can set off first thing in the morning.  I know Tonight's Menu has been a bit sub-standard* of late, but I will endeavour to remedy this just as soon as I can.

*who knew I had standards?