Since it was my turn to make DT breakfast, I decided to try to make something that could use up a lot of the leftovers in the fridge. I also wanted to do something a little different and revisit something that I’ve made in the past. So I made ratatouille-shakshouka toast, mostly by referring to this recipe as well as this one. It’s probably more ratatouille-ish than shakshouka-ish but whatever I made, it is still the bastard child of both dishes re-purposed for this breakfast. I’m actually a bit proud of this one because I was able to: 1) repurpose the leftovers of this breakfast for my lunch over multiple days and 2) clear out a good amount of odds/ends of other stuff in the fridge, which include but are not limited to:

• A package of cherry tomatoes
• A random half of red onion
• A half jar of pizza sauce after making pizza
• Leftover basil also from making pizza
• Some leftover garlic from something else, not sure what

This dish was fairly straightforward but was one of those things where there is a lot of sample prep that I wished I started on, even a day earlier. While I wasn’t trying to cut neat circular slices like the last time I’ve made ratatouille, I had to dice bellpeppers, onions, zucchini, and eggplant (didn’t bother trying to dice cherry tomatoes). That part was a bit tedious. On the bright side, I like to think that I am getting faster at cutting things nowadays but it still took me a bit of time to dice everything.

Again, not too sure how this is considered a peasant dish, considering how much fuss work goes into this. How did they find the time to make this?

The next step was to cook the vegetables individually. So, I ended up underestimating the amount of time this recipe would take because I thought I could cook everything together but alas, no. For each of the veggies, I cooked it in a cast iron skillet for around 6-8 minutes, seasoning it with garlic, salt, and red pepper flakes. This also marked my first time trying to stir-fry eggplant, which I haven’t done before.

Stir-frying eggplant was a bit of counterintuitive. It seemed very absorbent of oil so it just seemed that I was trying to stir-fry something that was dry so I kept being tempted to add more oil. However, over time, so long as I kept it moving, the eggplant eventually moistened up and started being stir-fried like any other vegetable. This could just be something that I could just keep a mental note for, should I choose to make an eggplant-based dish.

Anyway, back to the dish, after stir-frying everything, I mixed everything back in again and added the leftover pizza sauce, now deviating from the reference recipes and doing something similar to a sort of shakshouka setup. I then added water, some basil, and a bayleaf and let it simmer for about 15 minutes before folding in the rest of the basil. It appeared quite saucy and a bit too mushy (probably a tad overcooked) for my liking but I figure that was where the shakshouka aspect came in.

It tasted great. Only tweak I would make was to add less pizza sauce so it’s less tomato mush-like but hey, I needed to kill that can somehow.

Thus concluded part 1 of making it. The great thing about making this stew was that the flavors, if given time to rest, end up tasting a lot better the next day, which was what I was counting on.

The next day, right before DT breakfast, I sliced up some Sour Batard bread from TJ’s and toasted it at 350F for 3-4 minutes. I then fried up some eggs, sunny side up, seasoned with salt and pepper. The last step was to spoon some ratatouille-shashouka mixture onto the bread and top it off with an egg.

It tasted really good. It felt like I was eating shakshouka, except Italian/French style where instead of cumin and paprika, I seasoned it with basil and chili pepper instead. Luckily, the tomato flavor wasn’t too overpowering where I was able to taste the other veggies as well as the basil while I was eating the toast.

I ended up repurposing the leftover ratatouille mix to make a simple pasta for my lunch, which also gave me immense satisfaction as well. It appears that this dish is the gift that keeps on giving.

Overall, this was a pretty satisfying DT breakfast and a good exercise for me to figure out what I can re-use the things I can find in my fridge. With enough notice, I would definitely make this again. Maybe I can put more effort into making it more picturesque like the reference recipe next time.