The morning after the night before

At the end of October, All Hallows' Eve passed quietly in our neck of the woods but, the following morning, a walk into the centre of town provided a glimpse into the previous night's high jinks. Flour, eggs and (hopefully) tomato ketchup were coating walls, doors and pavements as if to suggest that there had been an outside broadcast of a monster episode of MasterChef. Indeed, there was also a profusion of empty paper bags, egg boxes and plastic containers strewn around, and even some full bags of flour dumped in alley ways.

My curmudgeonly reaction probably owed a great deal to my advancing years, but maybe also to the fact that when I was a youth, the ancient custom wasn't yet known as trick-or-treat in the UK, and was certainly less commercial. However, here in the 21st Century, and wearing my Love Food Hate Waste hat, I was a smidgeon irked. Returning home, I fired up my computer to see what a starving person (albeit one with internet and a functioning kitchen) might usefully do with such ingredients.

My first problem was that I try to be gluten-free these days, so I reluctantly removed flour from the search parameters, as I have plenty of GF pittas in stock, and pressed "Enter". When the results came through, I was dumbstruck and instantly transported back in time to a little Italian restaurant in Newport Pagnell and a favourite antipasto dish of mine. It was a dish which I had not encountered at any other Italian restaurant since.

My speechlessness was due to the fact that over the intervening years, I have occasionally attempted to find the recipe for this dish of asparagus, eggs and tomato sauce without any success. Now, I realised that when in the past I had typed in "asparagus" as the first part of my search parameters, I was setting myself up to fail.

Back in the present, I was staring at a computer monitor showing me images of various plates of Shakshouka, a North African dish of spicy tomato sauce and poached eggs cooked in a skillet. Better still, I was also informed that the Italian version of Shakshouka is Uova in Purgatorio (Eggs in Purgatory). I could see that with the addition of a few stalks of asparagus, my dream of the remembered antipasto was close to fruition.

At this point, Megan intervened with a firm "Hold my cappuccino!", and was soon busily engaged in a blur of kitchen utensils and Shakshouka ingredients.

We may well try the regional variations of this dish from all around the Mediterranean, from Italy, the Middle East, west through Tunisia and Algeria and up into Spain. I can confirm that it is very moreish as well as Moorish, but that's an exonym (another new word for me).

Every day's a school day.