This is closer to my go-to shakshouka than @Wanderfound’s (but oooh, mushrooms…) - green capsicums, onions, garlic, smoked paprika, cumin and (this is the very cool part) a teaspoon of carroway seeds. Sweat until capsicums are soft; add a tin of crushed tomatoes and some water, and simmer until mostly thickened. Add eggs and cook until done.
Serve with couscous and, if you like chilli, harissa from a tube like the one below.
The carroway seeds really make this.
When do the carroway seeds go in? At the start during the sautee, in the middle with the tomatoes, or right at the end?
The seeds go in with the sauté, but it’s a low temp sauté / sweat ie, put a lid on and turn it down, so it’s as much steamed as sautéed.
Prior to finding this recipe (wish I could remember where I first saw it), I’d only had carroway in cakes and buns but this opened my eyes to its savoury uses. It’s really worth a try!
Do the caraway seeds soften because of the slow sauté? Asking because one gets to an age where small seeds and old intestines do not interact well.
Rye bread made with caraway seed!
Specifically, Kaufman’s rye bread from Kaufman’s Bakery in Buffalo, NY.
Now you’ve sent me down Nostalgia Lane…
Oh, now I want me a liverwurst sandwich on Kaufman’s rye 
I still eat squid, almost strictly in ‘Arroz Negro’, an incredibly delicious Spanish rice dish that happens to be dirt cheap and easy to make. The only ‘catch’ is the squid ink (which colors the dish). I gave up years ago working with whole squid (in order to harvest the ink sacks; very laborious). Now I just get the heads and tubes from the nearby Whole Foods and keep Amazon-ordered squid ink at the ready. When I get a chance, I’ll post the recipe here.
A recipe I do for get togethers and such is Buffalo Cauliflower…
• Chop up a head or two of cauliflower into fairly even bite sized chunks. Flat sides are good, they help it brown.
• Spread them on a cookie sheet and roast about five minutes.
• Mix a cup of flour with a cup of water and season with salt and garlic powder. Toss the cauliflower in it until lightly coated, return to cookie sheet, roast until browned.
• Stir about 3/4 cup of Frank’s Red Hot (none other) and about 2 tbsp of melted butter [or use Frank’s Wing Sauce, which is fat free]. Toss the hot cauliflower in it to coat. Roast it again until crisp. Some folks add panko bread crumbs to help with the crisping.
They soften, but they’re still identifiable as seeds when you chew them. But sufficiently softened so those of us with zero space between our teeth don’t need to keep dental floss on hand!
I’ve never tried it, but that sounds perfect!
The flavor of caraway seeds with rye bread, warm potato salad, and other German foods was such a staple growing up that finding them in other places (cakes, curries, etc) is a funny sort of brain shift. But I will have to try them in a shakshouka sometime, they go very well with tomatoes.
Important detail…thank you!
Try growing up with poppy seeds being a sweet dessert staple! (OK, now I’m craving kolacky!)
Okay here goes. The Arroz Negro recipe (Rice with Squid) that I promised earlier. With very slight changes [to suit my desired results] it’s based on the recipe provided by food writer and author Penelope Casas. The recipe reportedly serves 4―6, but I’m more like 4 max.
4 tablespoons Virgin Olive Oil
1 large Yellow Onion (chopped)
1 ½ lbs. of raw cleaned Squid (Dry off thoroughly with paper towels. Cut tube bodies into ~½“ wide rings and coarsely chop the tentacles.)
3 ¾ cup Seafood Broth [Bottled clam juice works just fine as a substitute]
1 Pimento, cut into strips [Jarred versions are okay, but wash off the liquid the pimiento pieces were stored in then dry off thoroughly with paper towels. Otherwise, make your own pimento from one whole large red pepper. YouTube vids show how; very easy.]
Part A
1 clove Garlic (minced) [At the bottom of the post I show Casas’ recipe for Garlic Sauce which gets poured on to the finished Arroz Negro; if you don’t wish to do it up – big mistake – then I’d suggest you add three more minced garlic cloves to the Arroz Negro recipe, although the ‘effect’ would be different.]
1 medium Tomato (chopped) [I use meaty ‘heritage’ tomatoes; they actually have taste… and less water]
1 tablespoon fresh Parsley (minced)
1 teaspoon freshly ground Black Pepper
½ dried Red Chili Pepper (seeds removed; pepper crumbled)
1 teaspoon Salt [I always skip the salt, especially since the squid ink will add a bit of saltiness]
1 large pinch of Saffron [Not a major disaster if you don’t have it, but adding it would impart a very subtle flowery taste to the dish. If you simply want to color the dish, use a little Tumeric.]
Part B
¼ cup Dry Red Wine
2.5 tablespoons of liquid Squid Ink [Available through Amazon. There are powdered versions, but I’ve never tried those.]
2 cups short-grain Pearl White Rice (un-rinsed) [Arborio or Risotto rice are perfect substitutes for California-sourced pearl rice]
The cooking process involves first sautéing then finishing the dish in the oven. In an oven-safe frying pan (**or earthenware casserole), heat the Olive Oil and sauté the Yellow Onion until it becomes translucent.
Add the prepared Squid and sauté for 5 minutes. Stir in the Part A ingredients. Cover the pan (or earthenware casserole) and simmer for 30 minutes.
Start preheating your oven to 325 Degrees F. In a saucepan, heat the Seafood Broth to boiling, then add it and the Part B ingredients to the frying pan (or earthenware casserole). Stir it, then bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Leave uncovered and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Most of the liquid should have boiled off by then, but some liquid should remain.
Decorate the above with the Pimiento strips, then transfer to your pre-heated oven and bake for 15 minutes. All the liquid should be absorbed by then.
Remove from oven, then cover lightly with aluminum foil. Let it sit like that for 10 minutes to complete the cooking process. If you decide to make the Garlic Sauce – smart move – then it can be prepared while waiting these last 10 minutes: Place 3 crushed Garlic Cloves into a food processor/blender. With the motor running, gradually pour in ½ cup of Virgin Olive Oil; that’s your Garlic Sauce which can be passed around and added as desired onto the plated rice dish.
**A note on the earthenware casserole: I use it (a cazuela) since it’s ideal for this dish. Mine is 12” wide by 2” deep and gets the job done.
Does this keep well? (Eg make a big batch and reheat multiple days)
Sounds good, I’ve just found some rice dishes get stiff after a day or so, so if it can’t be done in a crock pot and my executive function is low that day I may not have the energy.
Out of curiosity does Amazon try to sell you weird pens now? 
Honestly, I don’t remember… Certainly I made enough for leftovers (I rarely cook anything for just 1 meal (except maybe breakfast)); I don’t remember it not keeping well. It has been a while since I’ve made it since I’m the only one who would eat it.
No. Not pens. I haven’t run into that. I do get hit with Amazon recommendations for items I window-shopped on their site and – more annoyingly – items that I had already purchased from them.
That sounds amazing! I’m a huge paella, risotto and any kind of fried rice dish fan, and that sounds perfect. I’ve made paella in the past and the slow cooking of squid with rice seems to get a perfectly tender result every time. Seafood and rice is a great combination, but it doesn’t need to be seafood - other proteins work too. One of my favouritis the snail and rabbit paella from a restaurant that has a stall at our local market. It takes a certain amount of courage to really cook the rice enough to get a crust, and I don’t have the courage to really cook it until it’s dry.
Sad bit of cooking news. Leah Chase, restaurateur and civil rights activist died June First at the age of 96
You lucky, lucky bastard!
I know exactly what you mean, and I’d be ashamed to tell you just how long it took for me to learn how to achieve a tasty socarrat (crust). (The operative word is “tasty”; I’ll get to that.) Opinions differ, though, on just how crusty that crust should be. Too hard a crust, and a burnt flavor creeps in… and what’s the fun in chewing on hard, burnt, wasted (and expensive) Bomba rice. (Just my opinion, but I’ve always felt that burnt socarrat is sometimes pawned off to restaurant patrons as something good.)
What I always shoot for is a thin, golden, gooey, yet very chewy, cohesive mass at the bottom; that yields a ‘crust’ that’s properly super-concentrated with whatever broth and *flavoring additions were used and without a hint of having been burned. The only way I’ve been able to reliably get there is by sticking with my 2-serving heavy-bottom 10" S.S. pan (not a paella pan which are too big for stove-top burners), and using 2/3 cup of Bomba rice with 2 cups of strong broth. That get’s me a nice low uncooked rice depth in the pan for even cooking of the rice. After that I play like crazy tending to the burner setting to get things to a low-ish boil and correcting as needed. I always pre-fry my seafood and/or meats, remove them from my pan with a slotted spoon (to get the drippings back into my pan), then spend a few minutes pre-frying (lower heat) my rice (and sofrito) in that same pan; that drives the hot – now *flavored oil – into the rice. As far as the heat for rice w/broth cooking, I always go for a low-medium boil so as not to nuke the rice at the bottom. When I do it right, the bulk of the rice ends up glistening, separated, and al dente… and the “crust” is as I described earlier. In a nutshell, for me the battle hinges on heat. At times I go – hmmm – and opt to finish things off in the oven (to get the rice more evenly cooked). Other times, when I start to hear a crackling sound, I check the “top” rice for doneness, then use a spatula to carefully lift a small section of rice to sneak a peek at the bottom for the old socarrat. Now that I’ve got myself into a gotta-make-another-paella state, I’ll meter myself this week by instead working toward a fava bean with clams soup!
