Shakshuka

At first glance, shakshuka might look like the result of a jolly in kitchen after a heavy night of drinking. Not that great things don’t come from cooking after a night out, but this particular dish (also spelled shakshouka) is in fact a one that’s much beloved across most of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Literally meaning ‘a mixture’ in Arabic Tunisian, it’s a simple combination of tomatoes, vegetables and spices which is then used to poach one or more eggs sitting on top. It’s easy to make no matter what part of the world you’re in and has countless variants that include additional ingredients like meats and cheeses. Although typically a breakfast dish, its popularity in countries like Israel have transformed it into something of an all-day affair, enjoyed in the evenings and especially during winter.

For this particular version, I included halloumi cheese to add a bit of creaminess. It’s such an easy recipe to make, comes out looking great and if you’re having a get together, is a really nice sharing dish that visually beguiles its simplicity. Ensure you have some bread to serve it with, that sauce isn’t going to mop itself up!

Serves 6

3 tbs extra virgin olive oil

1 red pepper, thinly sliced

½ large onion, thinly sliced

3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

½ tsp sugar

¼ tsp cayenne pepper (½-1 tsp if you prefer it medium-hot)

1 tsp cumin powder

1 tbs sweet paprika

1 tsp salt

¼ tsp black pepper

2 400g tins of peeled plum tomatoes

200g halloumi cheese, diced

6 large eggs

Coriander leaves for garnish

Heat the oil in a large pan over a medium-high heat. Add the sliced onion and peppers and cook for approximately 20 minutes, stirring occasionally until both have softened. Then add the garlic and stir for 2 minutes until softened. Now add the paprika, cumin, cayenne pepper, salt, black pepper and sugar, mixing it until the pepper and onions are well coated. 

The tinned tomatoes can now be added; ensure you break up the tomatoes well and stir until the contents of the pan are well mixed. Allow to reduce for 15-20 minutes or until thickened, stirring occasionally. Add the diced halloumi and stir it in. 

Before you add the eggs, make sure to push little indents into the surface of the sauce so that the yolks do not run away from you and become unevenly spaced. Now crack each egg and gently drop them evenly around the pan. Cover with a lid and allow the eggs to poach for 13-15 minutes, or until the yolks and whites have just set. 

Remove from the heat and season with salt and pepper to your taste. Garnish with the coriander leaves and serve with bread. 

Black Food Colouring

Up until the last couple of days, black food colouring - and how to get it - was something of a serial enigma to me. I knew it existed, but always presumed you could only obtain some in a Fallon & Byrne-esque eclectic food market or from catering suppliers. Infrequent expeditions to find it always ended one of two ways: failure and presuming I’d have to resort to Ebay (ala liquid smoke), or eventual distraction from other obscure delectables in the various places I’d have been searching. Don’t get me wrong, I did actually care about getting my hands on some but any attempt to do so was always on a whim. In other words, it only ever popped into my head every so often and seldom stayed there.

What changed all of this was a recent spate of cookie baking that culminated in this recipe for black and white tuxedo cookies, which itself was inspired partly by what I imagined a tuxedo cheesecake to look like: inky black juxtaposed with creamy white. The finished product tasted good, but ever since publishing the recipe I’ve wondered if I could have made the dark dough mixture just that little, y’know, truer to the pure black colour that ‘tuxedo’ implies. Finding a way to achieve this was quickly becoming a matter of principle!

Fast forward two odd months and Rebecca was busy whipping up the first recipe for her very own burgeoning food blog. She had the red, yellow and blue food colouring out and I was decidedly unoccupied off to the other side. Suddenly, it hit me; combine the colours, just like you used to in junior infants! Whodathunk all of those years of scribbling on a sheet of paper with an entire crayon set until it was a blackish/brown mess would actually come in handy for a bit of culinary inspiration? Before you could say hey presto, I was filling up my first little phial of black food colouring. And that’s the beauty of it; it only takes a few seconds to perfect.

Makes approximately one 25ml bottle of food colouring

1 tsp red food colouring
1 tsp yellow food colouring
3 tsp blue food colouring

Simply add each measure of food colouring into a small bowl or jug. Stir until properly mixed. To test the mixture, let one or two drops fall onto a kitchen towel. The more blue food colouring you add, the inkier it will be whilst less will yield a slightly more red/brown hue. Experiment a little and find exactly the right colour for the recipe you’re making.

The finished mixture is ideal for darkening the colour of chocolatey baked goods and a purely black icing. As with any other food colouring, there are any number of recipes it can be applied to but the first thing I personally will be doing with it is attempting what’ll hopefully be a rather sumptuous looking chocolate cake. Expect some news on that topic in the not too distant future! 

A Quick and Simple Spicy Barbeque Marinade

Even though there's a deluge falling outside as I write, it's fair enough to say that the weather hasn't been too bad so far this summer. Well, comparitively I mean. Normally, May tends to be a bit of an annual wahsout in Ireland; this time around we actually managed a week or two of sustained sunny weather! The measure of which in this country is - typically - the number of barbeques you can smell at any given moment, for where there is smoke, there is sunshine.

In contributing to all of this, we've already fired up a good five or six! Mostly it's been for the sake of a proper, chargrilled burger but there's always room for a marinated barbeque chicken fillet. The problem was that when I went to actually make some a couple of weeks back, I quickly discovered that the barbeque marinade I though I had stored away wasn't actually there anymore. Disaster!

For whatever reason (panic induced meat craving?), I immediately decided in looking at the fridge that mixing ketchup with one or two other ingredients would probably produce something similar. Enter my two good friends, dark soy sauce and smoked paprika! A quick stir later and surprisingly, I had ended up with a substitute that was close enough to your average bottled barbeque marinade.

Yes, the end result is a little spicier than you'd expect, but given the recent rise in popularity of bottled Jamaican jerk chicken marinades, it isn't anything too offensive. It looks even better than the real thing with a fantastic rich darkness about it, and tastes about as close as you can get to that barbeque marinade flavour without investing more time or resorting to more elusive ingredients like liquid smoke. It'll never replace the real thing for most people, but it certainly provides a remarkably quick alternative if you have the ingredients on hand.

Serves 2 (or, enough marinate for 2 large chicken fillets)

4 tbs tomato ketchup

2 tsp dark soy sauce

1/2 tsp smoked paprika

Simply add all of the ingredients into a medium sized bowl and stir until properly mixed. You can add the meat you intend to marinate immediately, or store the sauce in a sealed container until you intend to use it.

World Cup Consolation with Authentic Bobotie

The sunshine’s been (for the most part) rolling in, I’m off on a week’s holiday with the Taste of Dublin Festival inclusive, my laptop is back from its own little excursion and in general, the summer’s turning out to be an almost perfect one! Well, I say almost perfect for a reason, one that almost everybody in Ireland no doubt understand over the next month. That’s right, it’s time for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa; minus the boys in green, sadly. Most of the nation will probably adopt the ABF (anyone but France) approach instead of the usual gloating over England’s routine failure, but since very few of us will see the point in making a trip to support a generic team, I figured it would be a good idea to bring a bit of South Africa up to Ireland instead. Just so, y’know, we don’t all feel left out for the next four weeks. What I discovered in my research was bobotie; not only the purported national dish of South Africa, but an extremely rewarding and versatile recipe. It also has a reputation for being excellent comfort food, which is exactly what all the disillusioned Irish football fans out there could use I’m sure!

What follows is my own assembly of ingredients based on averaging several different versions of bobotie from across the internet.

Serves 6

1kg fresh Irish pork mince
2 medium onions
3 cloves of garlic
2 slices of plain, white bread
2 large Eggs
1 lemon
Several bay leaves
A handful of seedless sultanas
2 tbs vegetable oil
2 tbs malt vinegar
250ml milk
2 tbs chutney
1 tbs curry powder
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp ground cardamom seeds
1 tsp ground allspice berries
Salt
Pepper

Roughly chop the two onions and finely slice the garlic cloves, then add to a large, deep frying pan. Cook over a medium heat until the onions begin to soften and become transparent. Now add the minced pork, stirring well to break down any chunks; a very fine texture is what you’re looking to achieve.

Once the minced pork had been suitably broken down and has begun to brown, add the malt vinegar, curry powder, turmeric, cardamom seeds and allspice berries. Stir well until all of the ingredients are well mixed. Now add the chutney (I stuck with mango in this case, since it was all I had available but there are any number of varieties to choose from!), sultanas and squeeze in the juice of the lemon, again stirring until properly mixed. Salt and pepper to taste, then set aside.

Pre-heat the oven to 170˚c and grease a large baking dish. Spoon the minced pork mixture into the dish and spread it out evenly. Place in the oven for approximately 30 minutes, until it begins to turn a golden brown colour.

Whilst waiting for the minced pork to cook, prepare the topping for the bobotie. Remove the crusts from both slices of bread and soak in half of the milk. Squeeze to retain any excess milk out of the soaked bread and pour it back into the other half measure of milk. Mash the bread into a smooth paste, then add the eggs to the milk and beat until properly mixed. Finally, add the mashed bread paste to the egg and milk, stirring until fully broken down and the mixture thickens. Set aside.

Slice the banana thinly into several segments and place them evenly across the top of the minced pork. Pour the egg, milk and bread mixture evenly across the entire top surface, ensuring that it is completely covered. If not, simply repeat the topping steps with half measures to produce some extra mixture. Add several bay leaves to the topping and replace the dish into the oven until it begins to brown slightly.

Remove the bobotie and serve immediately with rice, chutney or a salad. Traditional bobotie is eaten with yellow rice and a chilli sauce called Sambal. It’s a wholesome and warming dish, so the perfect time to cook it (especially in this country!) would be the depths of winter. Nonetheless, its simplicity means that it’ll be a hit on any given day of the year. So whilst the rest of the world is having a taste of South Africa over the next month, get yourself involved instead of feeling left out and rustle some bobotie up!

Rebecca's Tuxedo Cookies

One of the many things Rebecca, my wonderful girlfriend, is good at is baking. Particularly cookies; I discovered this one evening upon arriving home from a bad day in work to a plate of wholesome, chocolate chip delights were waiting for me. Yes, they were made from a dough that both of us had mixed up a couple of nights beforehand, but her way of forming them produced a much more satisfying, thick cookie.

Back then, white chocolate and raspberries had been the key ingredients but I wasn’t entirely happy enough with the end result to post it up on the blog. No offence to the excellent cookies Rebecca made, I’m just a perfectionist. If the first batch of any recipe I take on doesn’t go well then I pretty much forget writing anything until the next bout. Roll on a couple of months and we tried again, only this time with more successful and ‘interesting’ results. The difference? I’d been told by Marion a while previous about a style of cheesecake called the Tuxedo; dark and white chocolate flavour as the name implies. I thought to myself: ‘surely this approach can be applied to cookies, right?’ In hope of not infringing any copyright I might not be aware of, I’m pleased to tell you that in can! So, perfected with a big help from her lovely self, I present to you Rebecca’s (and slightly my own) Tuxedo cookies.

The dough recipe is adapted from one I found at the start of the year on Refined Palate. You can follow the original here.

Makes 24-30 cookies

410g self-raising flour
125g cream flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sodium bicarbonate
2 tbs cocoa powder
250g sugar
250g brown sugar
440g soft butter
2 eggs
1 tbs vanilla essence
2 large bars of white chocolate
2 large bars of plain, dark chocolate

In a medium sized bowl, mix the self-raising flour, cream flour, baking power and sodium bicarbonate. Set aside. In a separate, larger bowl, add the sugar, brown sugar and butter. Stir and scrape the sides of the bowl until you achieve a smooth mixture with no lumps of butter left wanting. Now add the eggs and vanilla essence, stirring until they are well combined and the mixture is again smooth. Begin to add the flour, but not all at once; this will make things very difficult and messy. Instead, add a small amount at a time whilst stirring constantly.

Once you have fully combined the flour and achieved acceptable levels of doughvinity, separate half of the mixture into the bowl that previously held the flour. Add the cocoa powder to one of the mixture halves and stir until properly combined. Grease a sheet of greaseproof paper and line a baking tray with it, then preheat the oven to 190º c. Take the white and dark chocolate bars and break them into small chunks, just large enough to make sizeable chocolate chips in the finished cookies (think everyone’s favourite, M&S sized!). Set aside.

Now comes the fun part: take a piece of dough roughly the same size as the ball of your thumb (a little bigger won’t hurt!) from either bowl and stick them together. Remember that wetting your fingers in water before you handle the dough is a time-saver, as otherwise it will stick and become difficult to work with. Gently push the cocoa dough around the other, with the aim being to make a swirling pattern or to at least end up with cookies that are a little more interesting than half brown, half white discs. Pat the combined dough balls into a roughly spherical shape (I find the best way to do this is just to toss them back and forth between your hands, as per Rebecca’s teaching) and place on the baking tray in sets of no more than six at a time. Push each one down ever so slightly so that each one sticks to its spot, but not so much that you flatten them entirely. The higher they sit on the tray, the thicker they will be and thick, wholesome cookies are what we aim for! As for diameter, I find that if the dough on the tray is roughly one and a half to two inches across then you're going to end up with a good three to four inch in diamater cookie. The good thing here is that you've plenty of dough to experiment with, so find the size that's correct for you and nobody else. Just remember, the secret is to not flatten them.

You may notice that I never mentioned to add the chocolate chunks as per usual when mixing the dough. Personally, I find it much handier to add them as the final step before baking since this will allow you to decide exactly how they’re dispersed. Mixing them in can be a little hit and miss by comparison, unless you use excessive amounts of chocolate to compensate. So, simply take as many chunks as you like and gently press them into each individual cookie. My personal twist on this recipe is to keep the dark chocolate in the cocoa half of the cookie and mirror this with the white chocolate, but Rebecca does the opposite by placing the dark chocolate in the white dough. It really depends on preference, but I find that separating either set of chunks into their matching dough gives a more defined difference between either half. It’s all horses and courses at the end of the day, so do exactly as you wish!

Place the now chunked up cookies into the oven and bake for between eight to ten minutes. Remove once the white dough halves begin to brown slightly and place on a wire rack to cool for at least twenty minutes. Rinse and repeat until you have an entire batch. Use it to wow your friends, make new ones or just enjoy on your own with a big glass of milk!

Wholesome Tomato and Sweet Pepper Soup

I love tomato soup. Really, really love it. Specifically what used to be Campbell’s but is now Erin condensed cream of tomato soup; that one I loved to the point where it became an unhealthy culinary obsession. On any given day (ten years ago) you might have caught me having it for lunch, dinner, breakfast... Even a midnight snack at times! It was as much guaranteed to be in our cupboard as salt and pepper. Yes, that bad. Thankfully, those ten years have since taught that the world doesn’t revolve just around tins of glob. No, tomato soup is even more delicious – and rewarding – when homemade! Here’s a recipe for a very wholesome tomato and sweet pepper soup, perfect for warming up with, a good lunch or, in my case, your daily hit.


Serves 4/5

1200g vine ripened tomatoes
4 whole sweet peppers
3 cloves of garlic
250ml vegetable stock
2 tbs olive oil
1 tsp paprika
2 tsp sun-dried tomato paste or pesto
½ tsp salt
½ tsp pepper

Remove any vines from the tomatoes, wash them and score on four sides from top to bottom. Place them in a large pot of boiling water for roughly five minutes until their skin is visibly peeling. Whilst they are boiling, finely chop the garlic cloves and set aside. Drain the pot, remove the tomatoes and peel off all of the loose skin.

Prepare the sweet peppers. Remove the top of each one, slice them in half lengthways and de-seed. Place each slice skin side up on a grill and cook at a high heat until the skin is visibly burned and detaching from the flesh. Remove and de-skin by hand. The pepper slices should no longer be firm. If they still are, grill them for a few minutes at the same heat on the reverse side. Once softened, set aside.


Now for the fun part: blending the tomatoes. You can do this using a normal blender or a handheld one but if the latter then make sure to do so in a large, deep pot or container to avoid any dramatic mess. Once you have liquidised the tomato, repeat with the sweet pepper slices. If you have trouble blending the sweet pepper, particularly with a handheld blender, then add a small amount of water and this should help.

Add the olive oil to a large pot over a high heat. Then add the garlic and cook until it begins to brown. Add the tomato, sweet pepper, vegetable stock, paprika, salt and pepper to the pot. Stir until all of the ingredients are well mixed. Finally, add the sun dried tomato paste and stir until it breaks down. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 5-10 minutes, stirring regularly.

If you have a hand held blender, then simply stick it in at this stage and blend/whirl until it the soup has a smooth consistency. If not and just a regular blender, allow the soup to cool and then blend it. This is, however, just a personal preference given I like an even texture but if you don’t mind the occasional small piece of garlic then by all means, save yourself the time! Regardless, what you should now have in front of you is a large pot of wholesome, souped up goodness. Eat it on its own, with some bread or a serving of fresh cream for a really intense, rich experience.

Malt Shakes: a Flavour Experimalt

I know your secret Eddie. Rocket, that is. I’ve always had a big thing for their malt shakes, as does almost everybody else who I’ve ordered try one at some stage or another. Nothing quite beats one when you’re surrounded by 1950’s style decor with the Beach Boys piping in from above (NB: I don’t care what those signs on the wall say, the Jukeboxes do not work!). It doesn’t take a genius to see how they’re made, you just watch them do it over the counter. It starts with a few scoops of flavoured ice cream, then you add a piled high teaspoon or two of malt powder and finally give the whole thing a quick whirl in a milkshake mixer. The problem for me was always the powder itself though. I was convinced it was a specially made mix brought in from a wholesaler’s in a land both far and away, virtually impossible to obtain short of leaping in and grabbing the entire box. All hope seemed lost, but I usually do try to concentrate on that glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. This time it came in the form of my brother getting a job in the Santry branch of Eddie Rocket’s. Screw their secret sauce, I wanted to know what the malt powder was called, or where you could buy some! Do you want to know what he told me? ...It’s Horlicks. And it wouldn’t surprise me if half of you knew that already, or had just guessed even. Either way, after getting over the embarrassment I quickly popped on into Dunnes and bought myself some. What followed was an evening of malt experiments with numerous casualties: about a litre of milk, more than one tub of ice cream, two bananas, a package of blueberries, half a packet of ginger nut biscuits... The list goes on, but they didn’t all perish in vain since for the most part they all made quite delicious malt shakes. Whether or not that’s courtesy of Eddie’s or Horlick’s I really don’t know anymore but nonetheless, here are a few of the mixtures I came up with:


Coffee malt shake, serves 2/3

300ml fresh, cold milk
2 tsp of instant coffee
170g of vanilla ice cream
1 ½ tbs Horlicks powder

Before you begin, make sure to remove the ice cream from the freezer a good fifteen/twenty minutes prior to actually making the malt so that it softens; this will make speed up the process, especially if you have to finish them by hand! Once the ice cream is suitably soft, you’re ready to go.

Pour the milk into a tall container, for example a jug or measuring beaker. If you don’t have anything of this description to use then a large, deep bowl will do instead. Before adding the coffee, dissolve it in a very small amount of water so that you won’t be left with any stray granules that may escape the following steps. Add it to the milk and stir, then add the ice cream (if you have no regard for precise measurements – and I wouldn’t blame you when – then you should be aiming for roughly six generous scoops) and the Horlicks powder.

Finally, blend the mixture. Personally, I prefer to do this with a handheld blender as this gives you more control over the consistency of the mixture in a shorter space of time. A regular blender will do, but you will need to stir and push down any of the ice cream that isn’t caught. Otherwise, stir vigorously by hand until you get a smooth consistency. Taste, and if you feel it needs more malt then add another teaspoonful; this really is a matter of personal taste, I love mine very malty but the measure I've given is average. If you feel like experimenting, use a different flavour of ice cream instead of vanilla. Chocolate will of course work well in this case, as may another flavour. Do you like your malts thick? then simply add more ice cream. This recipe should give you a good milkshakeish consistency, but it's all about preference at the end of the day. Serve as a dessert or with a good old fashioned burger n’ fries!

Oreo malt shake, serves 2/3

300ml fresh, cold milk
6 Oreo cookies, crushed
170g vanilla ice cream
1 ½ tbs Horlicks powder

The process is almost identical to the coffee malt shake recipe above. Whilst waiting for the ice cream to soften, simply take a mortar and pestle to six Oreo cookies. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, wrap the cookies in a clean kitchen cloth and use a mallet or similar blunt object to bash them with until they're well broken up.


Assuming you will be finishing the mixture using a blender then do not crush the cookies too finely as leaving small chunks will make the overall shake more flavoursome. In the Oreo sense that is! If the mixing is to be done by hand then crush them more finely, but not into an outright powder. When ready, add the crushed Oreos to the milk before you add the ice cream and Horlicks powder. Serve on its own or with cream on top and a single Oreo cookie for decoration.

Banana malt shake, serves 2/3

300ml fresh, cold milk
2 small bananas
170g vanilla ice cream
2 tbs Horlicks powder

Again, simply follow the original set of instructions where adding and mixing the ingredients are concerned, only substitute the banana for the key flavour ingredient. A blender will, however, be required in this recipe as it can be difficult to achieve a smooth consistency by mashing and mixing the banana by hand. Slice both bananas in half and add to the milk prior to the ice cream and Horlicks. Blend. Note than in this particular recipe I have included an extra half tablespoon of Horlicks powder. This is because the banana flavour can be surprisingly strong, and on first attempt overpowered even the maltiness of the powder! Here is where I encourage you to experiment, to find the balance that’s right for you and your preferences. Either way, the malt will add body to the flavour but if you really like that malty taste then add more, it’s entirely up to you! Again, substituting chocolate ice cream for vanilla turns this into an even more interesting shake.

And that’s all my experimenting yielded for tonight. Well, in terms of success rather... but there are inumerable flavour combinations that you can try with malt shakes. It’s exciting, it’s fun; It’s definitely something I’ll do again. Bearing that in mind, if anybody has any suggestions then I’d love to hear them!