A good reason to eat breakfast.

This is my breakfast comfort food.

I really can’t recall where or when exactly I picked a recipe for these Moroccan Eggs, but I’ve been making these for something like 8 or 10 years now. The blandest description I saw was eggs poached in tomato ragout. Accurate, but entirely unappealing!

If you do google up moroccan eggs, you get a dozen results that are all quite close to this recipe. And apparently variations of this dish are popular in Israel Tunisia and Turkey as well. And each of these have interesting variations – with bell peppers, harissa and cheese included in the recipes.

The thing that will strike you, as it does anyone who tastes this, is how the flavor is so Indian. Spicy, based on tomato and onions that are the staple of so many of our curries, and cumin at the heart of the flavors.

This takes about 20 mins from start to finish. And serves feeds a couple that has had a busy saturday morning (yes, like we had today!)

2 onions sliced – i prefer thick slices as you can see in the finished dish above.

3 tomatoes – sliced, again thickly – pick the ripest tomatoes in your kitchen

3-4 pods garlic – roughly chopped

A couple of green chillies – each cut into 4 or 5 pieces

Red Chilly powder (1 tsp)

Zeera or Cumin powder (1 tsp, and another 1/2 tsp)

Salt to taste

4 eggs – best if they have been out of the fridge for a while.

And some olive oil of course.

Heat a couple of tbsp of olive oil in a 6″ or 8″ skillet (the one in the photo above is an 8″). Saute the onions and garlic together for about 4 minutes till they are translucent and soft. Keep the heat medium so you don’t end up browning or burning these up. Next, in go the tomato slices. Move them around to blend them with the (now cooked) onions and make sure that the onions aren’t buried under the tomato slices. 

This is the time to add the salt, red chilly powder (or use paprika if you want things lighter), the cumin powder (1tsp) and the salt and the green chilly.

Now just stir once in a while and let the whole tomato-onion mix combine and cook out. If things are starting to dry out, you know that the heat is too high! Remember, keep the heat medium to low, and move your tomato-onion mix around – without breaking up the pieces. In about 7-8 minutes (may be a couple of mins longer with more raw or green tomatoes), you should see the tomatoes fully cooked out, and moist and a saucy, oily separation to the sides of the pan.

Make four ‘indents’ within the mix in the pan now and break one egg into each indent. Use a fork if you need to spread the whites of the egg around the pan, and let the eggs cook inside this mix for a minute. Sprinkle some more salt, little red chilly powder and the rest of the cumin powder onto the eggs, and cover for the last couple of minutes. The covered pan allows the soft egg whites right on top to cook and settle down.

Open pan, throw in some coriander leaves and serve with toasted bread, pao, or (as I did) last night’s garlic toast from Hard Rock Cafe’!

This rustic mix of the eggs and the tomato-onion mix makes for a hearty breakfast, and its one of those simple dishes that makes you scrape the pan with your last bits of bread!

Try this out and write to me. Its quick and simple to rustle up, and a delight to eat!

The variations I mentioned before? I will try out and revise this post soon; but they involve including some red or yellow peppers into the tomato mix, and one  variations ends with some cheese chunks to be placed in the pan before the end.Worth a shot!