Guest breakfast

My niece Alison came to visit on a school break.  When I asked if there was anything she wanted in the house she immediately enthused, "Eggs!"  Apparently the food service at school only serves powdered eggs and she was dying for real fresh eggs.  She insisted on preparing breakfast for us, an Israeli dish called Shakshuka. 

Ali chopped up onions, peppers and tomatoes and sauted them slowly with tumeric.  It creates a lovely soupy sauce in the pan.  Then with a spoon she makes slight grooves in the sauce and breaks eggs into that, covers the pan and lets the eggs poach in the savory sauce.

The eggs and sauce combination are spooned onto toast with melted cheese.  We used my grandma Nettie's old blue and white dishes and I told Ali a bit about Nettie, her lovely Russian Jewish accent, the fact that she sewed all of her own beautiful clothes, and that once she hitchhiked, wearing a full-length pink sequined gown of her own making, to a family bar mitzvah when she missed her bus.  I love breakfast.