Turkish-style Stuffed Eggplants

'Twas winter, and the slithy veg

Did whiffle in the tulgey store:

Tomatoes pale and kale unhale

Lead cooks to yearn for more.

Yet beamish eggplants, gloaming bright

More frumious than any foe

Are firm and frabjous, as they are

Imported in from Mexico.

One two! One two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack.

I halved them flat and stuffed them up

With lentils for a tasty sup.

***************

This particular meal -- which featured homemade Turkish lavash, kidney bean salad, olives and stuffed eggplants -- was inspired by recipes in Sarah Beattie's Vegetarian 30 Minute Turkish Cookbook (London: Thorsons, 1998).

Tea-towel and tea-lights in an attempt to make my Ikea table look more Turkish. 

Note the phrasing "inspired by." I love the premise of this cookbook -- that vegetarian Turkish cuisine exists, that it can be prepared quickly, and that simple, fresh ingredients yield delicious food -- but the actual recipes are seriously misleading. First, the proportions in many of the recipes are way off. Secondly, many of the recipes take far longer than 30 minutes, even for an experienced cook.

Kidney beans, carrots, and potatoes marinated in lemony tomato sauce.

For example, Beattie's bean salad recipe calls for half as many beans and twice as much lemon as I used. Mine nonetheless tastes extremely lemony, on the verge of too acerbic. Also, the recipe calls for one carrot and one potato, diced and cooked in the pan until soft. To actually soften carrots and potatoes in the pan, even when relatively finely cubed, takes a long time -- and in my haste to make the 30-minute deadline, a.k.a. my growl-stomached impatience to finish the dish, my carrots and potatoes came out undercooked, despite frying them on high for 20 minutes. Crunchy potatoes are the worst. And in both recipes (the bean salad and eggplants), I used 1/2 and 1/4 (respectively) the onions called for the recipe, and it was more than enough. Who needs 2 diced onions for enough eggplant to serve 4 people? That's half an onion per capita. WTF (= what the food)??

Of course, my preparation of this meal was not aided by the unexpected discovery that MY OVEN IS BROKEN. I was just about to put in the eggplants when I realized that it smelled strongly of gas and was cold as a cucumber inside. Good thing I didn't blow myself up, or Sylvia Plath myself; but determined not to give up, I prepared the entire dinner on the stovetop, primarily in a wok, and it took forever.

So overall, a delicious meal that took way longer than it should have. If you use an oven as the recipe specifies, you'll be in good shape.

Rather than reproducing the author's recipe verbatim, here's my own modified recipe. The lentil filling makes way too much, but this way you can have the leftovers as a tasty lentil stew. Or you can cut the ingredients in 1/4 if you want just enough for the eggplants.


Turkish-style Lentil Stuffed Eggplants

Ingredients
4-5 baby eggplants (the kind that are ca. 5 inches long)
1 cup dried lentils, rinsed (recipe calls for 1 can lentils, which saves cooking time but yields less flavorful filling)
Enough veggie broth to cover lentils plus 2 inches
1 14oz can diced tomatoes
1/2 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Cumin, salt, pepper to taste
Chopped parsley
Olive oil

Method
Begin by preparing the lentil filling. Brown lentils take a while to cook, and the longer this filling simmers, the tastier it becomes. Thus multitask by making something else -- salad, lavash, etc. -- while the filling is cooking.

Fry the onion and cumin in olive oil, then add the lentils, broth (or salted water), and tomatoes (including juice) and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook until lentils are soft, stirring occasionally. Once lentils are soft, turn off heat and add salt/pepper to taste, then stir in chopped parsley.

When the lentils are about 3/4 done (a bit chewy/crunchy, but softened somewhat), prepare the eggplants. This recipe calls for baby eggplants, which cook quickly and are kind of adorable.

After washing eggplants, cut off stems and halve lengthwise. Coat generously in olive oil and bake in oven at 350° F. Remove when eggplants are soft all the way through. 

(But of course, since my oven was broken, I cooked them a few at a time in the wok. It was a pain.)

Scoop out eggplant flesh, careful not to damage the exterior shell. Chop flesh, mix with enough lentil filling to stuff eggplants, and pile into the eggplant shells.

At this stage, the eggplants are finished. If you prefer vegetarian to vegan, you can sprinkle cheese on top, such as the parmesan seen in my final photo. Before I knew my oven was broken, I was planning to crumble goat cheese on top, then pop them back in the oven. 

These eggplants are delicious with any sort of pita, flatbread, lavash, or crusty bread. The Turkish lavash I made came from this blog and it turned out well. Oil-cured olives are also a tasty accompaniment.

Overall, a delicious meal. I'll include the (modified) bean salad recipe below, for those who wish to duplicate it in its entirety. 

Marinated Kidney Bean Salad

Ingredients
1/2 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 waxy potato, diced
2 cups Italian strained tomatoes
2 cloves garlic
2 14oz cans red kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 tbsp sugar
1 lemon, juiced
Chopped parsley
Salt to taste

Method
Fry the carrot and potato in olive oil until mostly soft. Add onion towards the end of this process, since it takes less time than the other veggies. When onion is translucent, add garlic, beans, tomatoes, and sugar. Simmer for 5-10 minutes. Remove from heat, salt to taste, and add lemon juice. Top with parsley and refrigerate overnight for marinated goodness, or eat warm with bread.

Uh... yum.

Chinese Eggplant! oh, wait... FAIL

After my recent trip to Lao Hunan in Chicago's Chinatown, I decided to head back there with some friends and try more items on the menu. The result was very attractive on the plate:

 ... but INEDIBLE. One of the rare occasions I've had to send something back, which felt strangely dangerous given the Mao-themed environs.

The dish was Crispy Eggplant Hunan Style, with battered and deep-fried pieces of eggplant tossed with peppers (both fresh and dried). Yet the batter was so unbelievably salty that we found ourselves cringing as we attempted to eat the stuff. As a substitute, they brought a rendition of the eggplant in plum sauce (pictured in my last Lao Hunan entry) that was tasty, but this time there was an oil slick about an inch wide pooling around the edge of the plate. This is often a problem in Chinatown, I've found -- food is too salty, too greasy, too spicy. And the Caucasian connoisseur inevitably asks his/herself: is it supposed to be that way? Do Chinese people eat it this way? AM I GOING CRAZY, OR IS IT THE WORLD AROUND ME??

In the end, we decided that people from Hunan likely have similar tastebuds and the salt-lick eggplant was probably a mistake.

Meanwhile, I bought some Chinese eggplants, unflavored seitan, and Taiwanese chili-fermented-bean paste while in Chinatown. I decided to make a stir-fry, which unfortunately was also one big FAIL. But like the above, it looked pretty:

I crafted this dish with the hypothesis that Chinese food in restaurants tastes better because it has more oil, salt, and sugar than homemade. Thus, I made a stir fry my usual way, but added considerably more salt and sugar to the sauce. Lo and behold, it tasted like my usual sub-par stir fry, only sweeter and saltier. So much for that hypothesis.

My only consolation was that the seitan itself turned out well. I soaked it overnight in the chili sauce, along with sticks of chopped ginger and large pieces of garlic. It gained a lot of flavor and softened up in the pan.

I think this dish would have turned out just fine had the sauce tasted better. The fermented bean chili paste has a weird flavor that leads me to suspect that the jar is several decades old. I deny any blame for the dish turning out crappily.

Seitan a-soakin' and eggplants a-sittin'.

 First I fried the eggplants in a bunch of vegetable oil.

Until they were cooked through and lightly browned. Still spongy in this photo.

Then I sauteed the marinated seitan.

I added onions, scallions, and peppers to the mix. I probably should have added the onions earlier, or cooked them by themselves and then added the seitan. They were a little underdone, contributing further to this dish's crappiness.
(Three Crappiness?)

I added the eggplant back in.

Then added the sauce and cooked until it looked marginally appetizing.

Well, that's it for my eggplant exploits of late. Fail and more fail. Hopefully my next entry will involve actual cooking success, as is expected on a cooking blog. Geez.

Indian baingan bartha

I've never been superb at Indian cooking -- it requires a certain degree of skill, training, and long cooking times that I've never been able to achieve. But that doesn't stop me from trying, and this time the result was a tasty spread of Indian classics: chana masala (tomato chickpeas), rasaam soup (tamarind sweet-and-sour), and of course baingan bharta (smoky eggplant stew).

We (as in me and co-chef Josh) ended up using this recipe for the baingan bharta. It turned out well -- my only rookie mistake was not cooking the eggplant enough before it went into the pan, with the result that the dish was more chunky and less creamy than it should be. 

We started by roasting the eggplants over the flame on my gas stove, then stuck them in the oven for a while, and finally peeled off the skin and mashed the flesh.

Coarsely mashed eggplant.

Other tasty ingredients ready to go.

Next we sauteed onions, garlic, ginger, and spices in oil, then added tomatoes and let the mixture cook down. 

Flavorful components break down in oil or butter: a typical step in Indian dishes.

Then we added the eggplant to the mix, cooked it down for a while and towards the end of the process, added green peas (not in the recipe, but a yummy addition).

Yours truly adds the eggplant to the mixture.

Co-chef Josh gives the goop a stir.

Simmering in the pan.
Note that photos are blurry because my kitchen is SO INSANELY DARK ALL THE TIME. Apologies.

Chana masala cooking alongside.

Lycopene goodness, again, as usual. Do I ever cook anything without  tomatoes?

At the end of the cooking process, we added chopped cilantro and lots of salt. Without the salt, it tasted pretty bland -- so don't skimp on the sodium!

The end result up close.

The oilier, the tastier!

Don't forget the flatbread and rice!

Naturally, the perfect addition to an eggplant-ful meal is eggplant relish, a spicy-sweet-sticky paste that is delicious with rice or bread and yogurt. Lime pickle is also a delicious condiment on the side.

Om-nomming our meal: a candid rather than posed portrait.

Eggplants of Chinatown, Episode 5: Lao Hunan

This post is part of an ongoing series, in which I venture through Tonu Hu's restaurants (simply because they have the most eggplant variety on their giant menus) in Chicago's Chinatown. The following posts will get you caught up:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4

I finally branched out and tried one of Tony Hu's other restaurants, Lao Hunan. The experience was completely bizarre. First of all, we arrived in Chinatown via the Water Taxi, which is by far the best method of transport to the area -- I'd highly recommend.

The top of my father's head and I pull up to the Chinatown pier.

As I expected, the food was delicious, no surprises there -- but I didn't anticipate the communist-China-themed decor. The waitstaff was clothed in the standard green pocketed uniforms of the early regime, like so:

Snapping a photo of our waitress felt a little too bold, so here's an image from Google instead. 

One long wall was plastered with a photo of Mao smiling across the masses, with the words "Serving People" in Chinese and English translation.

On the other wall, a list of notable figures from Hunan, some of whom were artists, writers, philosophers, etc. but many of whom listed simply, "Revolution Martyr."

Needless to say, the choice of decor -- and particularly the green waitstaff uniforms -- was a combination of hilarious and unsettling.

The food was fantastic, as usual, with a giant tome-like menu from which to choose. I'd highly recommend the wood-ear mushrooms appetizer, in which fresh wood-ears are marinated in a spicy, sour, pickly sauce.

Not sure whether the giant chunks of garlic are there for added flavor,
or whether people are actually expected to eat those. We abstained.

Naturally, I ordered an eggplant dish that I'd never seen at the other restaurants -- eggplant in plum sauce. This dish is actually my new favorite, if you can imagine anything to top the Lao Beijing House Special in my past posts.

The sauce tasted similar to garlic sauce, but with an extra sweet/sour component that distinguished it from dishes I've had in the past. I'm not sure that I could taste plum in particular, but it had the perfect balance of sweet, sour, spicy and salty that I expect in a Chinese stir-fry slathered in gooey sauce. The only downside was the extreme greasiness, which seems to be the norm for eggplant dishes in Chinatown.

Harmony of the Nightshades

Greetings, eggplantophiles.

Have you ever noticed how many recipes feature eggplants in conjunction with tomatoes? Apart from Asian cuisine, this particular ingredient combination is extremely pervasive around the world. Indian baingan bartha, Italian caponata, Turkish imam bayildi, French eggplant and tomato tart, Aubergenius's very own Mediterranean-inspired "lycopene stew"... the list goes on. This particular harmony of nightshades makes perfect sense: eggplant is a flavor sponge, while tomato (and especially tomato paste) adds richness of flavor. Combine with oil, spices, and other rich flavor components -- garlic, onions, herbs -- and a delicious dish automatically emerges.

Plus, both ingredients have the capacity to be extremely silly.

Crazy eggplants at the Issaquah farmer's market, photo courtesy of my mother.

Even crazier tomatoes somewhere in the world, photo courtesy of someone or other on the interwebs.

All this talk of eggplants and tomatoes brings me to a brief restaurant segment. Some time ago I made a trip to Sayat Nova, an Armenian restaurant in the Chicago Loop. Restaurant pros: a more interesting Loop option than the pervasive steak houses, casual dining chains, and Irish pubs in that area; beautiful decor; tasty food. Restaurant cons: given the Loop location, rather expensive for the food quality; food is tasty but not necessarily upscale, despite slightly upscale prices.

Among the items we ordered was a vegetarian cold combo, which included stuffed eggplant similar to Turkish imam bayildi (the countries do share a border, after all) and the best grape leaves any of us had ever had.

And to continue on the eggplants-tomatoes-vicinity of Turkey rant, I recently made a reincarnation of the dish with Georgian-inspired spices featured here -- but this time, I added tomato paste (and excluded the apricots). It was totally delicious. Turns out that Kmeli Suneli, the spice mix used in Georgian walnut sauce, is enhanced by the addition of tomatoes.

Kmeli Suneli-seasoned eggplant salad with tomato paste, olives,  onions, peppers, and parsley.
Featured with a great deal of hummus.

Totally delicious combo.

In the end, it doesn't really matter where the dish comes from -- virtually any combination of these ingredients yields delicious results. This is why I'm so reluctant to post actual measured recipes on this blog. Eggplant rarely needs recipes... if anything, recipes with too little oil or salt yield eggplant disasters, leading many people to dislike eggplant generally. It's better to work with guidelines for which ingredients combine well, which techniques are necessary for making eggplant delicious, and run with it!

[Anti-recipe soapbox dismount]