Stocking up for Fall

Classes start tomorrow, and today I'm trying to get my house in order, preparing to be submerged in the school kitchens for another eleven weeks. One of the resolutions I made, coming out of my week at the farm, is to waste less food at home. I've slumped into some bad habits; buying groceries with good intentions and then finding sad bags of moldy veg lurking in the crisper weeks later; being lazy about separating food parings for composting; going out to eat when I'm "too tired to cook." I won't promise to be perfect, just to be more mindful, and today I made a good small start.

I sifted through everything in my fridge, and did some cooking for meals later this week. Lucky for my pride, this time the dive into the fridge turned up only one item that had to be composted (a half jar of very expensive fermented carrots, that had molded) and everything else got either cooked or otherwise prepped for use. Here's my list of accomplishments for the day:

Cooked up a big pan of shakshuka sauce
Refreshed my sourdough starter
Cut up a bunch of fresh veg for snacking
Stewed all the veg trimmings to make a quart of vegetable stock

I will freeze some of the pepper sauce and the stock. There are dozens of recipes for shakshuka, but they all result in a strongly seasoned tomato-based sauce, in which you poach eggs before serving it topped with a bit of yogurt and accompanied by good bread. Mine is based on Yotam Ottolenghi's recipe in the cookbook "Jerusalem," though you can see another version of his recipe here. It's a very flexible thing to make.

Shakshuka sauce

Dice 4 or 5 good-sized sweet or bell peppers
Chop 4 cloves of garlic
Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a heavy, deep pan
Add the peppers and garlic along with:
a teaspoon of cumin and of salt
2 teaspoons of tomato paste
a teaspoon of Sriracha or hot sauce of choice

cook this all for about 10 minutes to soften the peppers
add about 5 cups of chopped tomatoes (fresh or tinned, or a mix)

cook until the sauce becomes fairly thick (about 20 minutes)