Shakshuka with Feta

Sometimes when life gets busy, I fall into a routine and make the same few dishes all the time. Not that there’s anything wrong with routine, but when I stop for a moment and look at what I’ve thrown into my cart at the grocery store I’m hit with the realization that I’ve been buying the same items and making the same meals for a while. Life is too short to be stuck in a rut.

Now that it’s getting warmer out, our chickens all started laying eggs again, so I sought out something new that uses eggs and came across this Shakshuka with Feta recipe from The New York Times. What isn’t there to love about poached eggs in a tomato-based sauce?

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I have never had Shakshuka before, so I honestly don’t know what’s authentic. From doing a little reading I gathered it’s a staple food in the Middle East and North Africa, and when something is a staple food, it usually means it’s relatively simple and good enough to eat all the time. My kind of routine food!

The beauty of this dish is that it’s all done in one pan. The only time consuming bit is making sure the onions and peppers are cooked gently until nice and soft. The rest is just simmering and finishing in the oven. I love all runny eggs: Soft-boiled, over-easy, poached…so this dish really hits the spot. It also makes for a great sharing dish.

The one complaint I have with this particular recipe is that it didn’t specify the size of the pan. It says “large skillet” but “large” can be a relative term. I estimated that I would need a pretty big pan based on needing to drop 6 eggs into it without them converging into one giant sunny side up. I used the biggest skillet I do have which is a 13.25″ Lodge cast iron skillet, and it worked out well. The 13.25″ measurement is the diameter of the top rim.

If you’ve never made Shakshuka before, this recipe is a good starting point. It seems there are different varieties of Shakshuka, ones with olives or meat in it, and some with different spices. Once you get the basic gist though, I can see this being a nice theme and variation type meal.