The beauty of canned sardines
The other day, I had the Little One by myself for much of the evening and was at a loss for what to cook that night. She ate some leftovers and was happy enough. But I needed to make something and so while she played on the floor with her set of plastic fruits and vegetables I kept one eye on her and prepped the dish you see above.
I’ve written about sardines and eggs before, but this time around I made some adjustments. The crux of the dish is canned sardines, which we tend to have simply sitting around in the pantry, waiting for us to remember we have them. For this preparation, I used two full cans. After heating a dish in the oven at 500 degrees for five minutes, I tossed the full contents of the two cans, a full sliced red onion, most of a jar of capers, and — in a major departure — a can of tomato soup into the dish.
Following the recipe I’d used before, I left that concoction in the oven for six minutes before adding five unbeaten eggs and a bunch of ground pepper. That went back into the oven for seven minutes, then came out and was allowed to sit for more than five minutes, at which point we feasted.
The end result was something not unlike a shakshuka.
The onions turned sweeter as they were cooked, and that combined with the tomato soup to bring acidic sweet notes through the rich fishy egginess and flashes of salt from the capers.
The Co-Pilot and I ate it just like that, straight out of the baking dish and into serving bowls, unadorned, though I imagine eating it with saltines or some other form of bread or cracker makes all sorts of sense, too.
