Harissa!

...I am sloooowly expanding my recipe repertoire, or as I like to call it, my recitoire, to include traditional North African spices and ingredients.

My latest love: harissa.

Harissa is a North African spicy tomato based sauce. The basic ingredients: one or two cloves of garlic, minced, lemon juice from one lemon, a tablespoon or two of tomato paste, ground caraway, salt, pepper and cumin to taste, and a third to a half cup of olive oil. It's very easy to make - just combine all the ingredients and mix well.

Harissa is usually served with traditional tagines (kind of like a stew), but it's so tasty I think it could stand alone as a bread dip (maybe with some hummus, baba ganoush, which by the way means "hungry daddy," and goat cheese...). I like to toss sliced zucchini in harissa and roast it in the oven till the zucchini is just tender.

I recommend going easy on the caraway at first. It's a very nice spice (hehehe) but has a really strong and distinctive flavor that could overpower your harissa if you add too much.