Ever since I bought Peter a little thing called The Hungover Cookbook, I’ve been wanting to try a recipe in it for something called Shakshuka, which is a single pan dish of spicy tomato sauce and baked eggs.

The procedure is simple. Make the sauce in the pan, crack in the eggs and cook them until they begin to set, and then finish the dish in the oven. However, I was missing two key ingredients to realise my ambition: a cast iron pan, and a copy of the cookbook. I’ve owned the pan for a couple weeks now, but had not had the time to go buy the book until today.

I woke up wanting the eggs, but still lacking the recipe. Being an adult, I can go right ahead and ruin my appetite if I want, so I made three fried eggs and covered them with pepper sauce. Mmm. Four hours later, it was time for lunch and lo all I had around was eggs. So I made three more and covered them with a different pepper sauce. (I own a few varieties). Unsated and unfazed, I went out on my cookbook purchasing errand.

It being Berlin, and a Sunday, I had to make a few adjustments to the recipe. It called for jalapeños but I used a couple of Thai chillies from my freezer stash. It called for smoky paprika but I used a smoky dried chilli pepper. It called for four eggs, but I used two because — really — 10 eggs in one day? That’s just crazy.

Watching eggs cook is more exciting than watching paint dry.
It gets “exciting” around 2:30 when I turned up the heat.

p.s. It was really yummy!