More Eggplant Denverings

In my last entry, I mentioned the amazing cooking of my Aunt Susan. I'm fortunate to have many inspiring home cooks in my family: my mother and her two sisters are all incredibly skilled and creative in the kitchen, and yet each sister has her own distinctive cooking style. I think if you served me three dishes, one from each sister, I could tell them apart -- and it wouldn't be possible for me to choose a favorite. Many years ago my cousin suggested that we collect recipes into a "three sisters" cookbook, and I still think it's a great idea... if any of us had the time or resources to actually create such a thing.

Whenever I visit Denver, my hometown, I'm always eager to cook with my Aunt Barb, who makes amazing dishes that span every cuisine across the world. Most of the time I'm afraid to cook East Asian (of any kind: Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese... you name it). I seem to have an East Asian curse, in which everything I make turns out horrible nomatter what recipe I use, nomatter how authentic the ingredients are, nomatter how much advice I get from my more experienced Aunt-chefs. Last night, for example, I made a hot-and-sour noodle soup slightly thickened with tapioca starch... except the soup tastes terrible and the starch refused to dissolve, resulting in little blobs of jelly swimming around in there like aspic bubbles or those tiny creatures that wash up on the beach. Gross.

When I visited Denver this past Thanksgiving, my Aunt Barb served a far more successful -- and totally beautiful -- Asian meal, which did in fact include eggplants.

An amazingly colorful meal: scallion pancakes, spring rolls, ginger-lime-leaf cabbage slaw, and tons of different dipping sauces. 

The eggplants were cut into strips, roasted, and rolled up inside spring rolls. The rolls also contained wedges of avocado, smoked tofu, and asparagus.

And everything was truly as delicious as it looks.

***

This completes my trio of Christmas entries, none of which I should be writing right now. 

Procrastination complete. 

3, 2, 1... initiate proposal-writing.

As Quick as Curry Gets

A while back, my Aunt Susan -- an incredible home cook, and one of the most fun kitchen companions I know -- sent me a recipe for Instant Eggplant Curry. While I don't think the eggplant stew itself is instant (one of the challenging things about eggplant is that it always takes a while to cook), her recipe instantly transforms an ordinary eggplant-tomato stew into a delicious curry.

Here's the scoop from Aunt Susan:

Thought you would like this eggplant dish I just made. It's a kind of sweet and spicy eggplant curry. The shortcut was using a couple of tablespoons of eggplant chutney to flavor it, after frying the onions, eggplant, garlic,and tomatoes. The dish went from ubiquitous eggplant in tomato sauce to spicy curry in seconds! One of my Indian friends gave me a quart jar of her daughters' mother in law's homemade tomato chutney... It's good as a condiment, but worked great as a spice paste too!

Inspired by Aunt Susan, I've also been experimenting with easy eggplant curries. While I love cooking (obviously), I'm also a chaotically busy graduate student with little time to cook during the week. I'm always looking for quick recipes that are inexpensive, satisfying, and taste good as leftovers.

While curry powder tastes OK, I've found that curry paste tends to have a richer flavor (either that, or the various spiced chutneys that can double as curry paste -- thanks, Aunt Susan!). In the foreign foods aisle of most groceries, you can find Indian curry paste in a jar, which usually has the same ingredients I might use if I made a similar paste from scratch.

Here's an easy eggplant-chickpea-tomato curry that I made from one of these commercial pastes:

Ta-da! Total cooking time: 30 minutes. Number of meals: 6. Cost of ingredients: $8.

Ingredients:
1 large eggplant
1 can diced or crushed tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
1/2 can coconut milk
1/2 onion, sliced
1/2 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
generous scoop of curry paste (adjust quantity to taste)
fresh cilantro

Steps:
Wash the eggplant, cut in half, coat each half in olive oil, and roast in the oven until eggplant is soft (350 degrees, around 20-25 minutes). Remove the skin from the roasted eggplant and roughly chop/mash.

Sautee the onions and ginger in olive oil, along with whole cumin seeds. Add the curry paste to the oil and sautee very briefly (burns quickly!). Add tomatoes and drained/rinsed chickpeas, along with a splash of water or broth. Simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the cooked eggplant and continue to simmer for a few additional minutes until the flavors have soaked in and some of the water has boiled off. Taste the mixture and add salt if necessary.

Turn off the heat and add the coconut milk when the curry has cooled slightly. (If you boil coconut milk, it tends to separate, so always add it after the curry is finished cooking.) Do a final taste check and add any necessary salt. Top with fresh cilantro and serve with bread or over rice.

The finished curry in the pan.

I guess it doesn't look that appealing... but tastes delicious!

An Aubergenistic Christmas

This lovely piece of photoshopping (done entirely without Photoshop, using only the miserably rustic Paint program) was featured in a Christmas entry two years ago. Since I put so much time and effort into this silly JPEG, it seems fitting to recycle:

Merry Aubergistmas.

Given that I, in all my Jewishness, do not especially celebrate Christmas -- and given that I am no longer dating a guy who does -- my Christmas today consists of something like this:

Yes, kitty is in fact responsible for the damage to the bed frame.

In other words, I'm spending the day hiding in my apartment, still in my pajamas, munching on chocolate, and writing my dissertation proposal (the research for which you may explore by reading my other blog). Today's various eggplant entries reflect my utter desperation to further procrastinate the proposal, even though it is IMPERATIVE that I finish it today, and even though there is absolutely nothing open, I have nothing else to do, and I have run out of excuses. 

But eggplants are important, right? 

Around Thanksgiving, I was in the mood for eggplant comfort food and I created a tasty, warming, Thanksgiving-like salad that could potentially double as a Christmas classic:

Roasted Eggplant and Portobello Salad with Balsamic Vinegar and Goat Cheese

It... tastes better than it looks. 

Ingredients

Several small/medium eggplants (graffiti or Italian variety)

2 portobello mushroom caps

balsamic vinegar

olive oil

garlic

fresh Thanksgiving herbs (sage, rosemary, thyme)

goat cheese

pepitas (roasted, salted pumpkin seeds)

salt and pepper to taste

As usual, this dish originated with a purchase of beautiful eggplants, followed by me fishing around for something to do with them. These graffiti eggplants are so beautiful that I was looking for a way to preserve their outside appearance -- and while I thought that roasting large pieces might leave the skin intact, the pieces turned brown like any other eggplant. I think the only way to keep that beautiful color is to deep-fry them, giving the skins no opportunity to oxidize in the open air... but this greasy, unhealthy, splattery method of cooking is not especially appealing to me.

Graffiti eggplants: vegetable or modern art? 

I decided to cut the eggplants into diagonal chunks, the way I've seen Chinese restaurants do it. 

Coat the eggplant pieces with a generous quantity of olive oil and roast at 350 degrees, turning them periodically until they're all thoroughly softened.

While roasting the eggplants, prepare your balsamic-marinated mushroom slices in a pan. Slice the mushroom caps into pieces that are similar in size to the eggplant chunks, merely for aesthetic purposes.

Sautee the mushrooms in olive oil until they start to look partially cooked, exuding juice. Add crushed garlic and let this cook for about a minute, stirring frequently to keep the garlic from burning. Then chop up your Thanksgiving herbs and add them to the pan, along with a generous dousing of balsamic vingear and some salt and pepper.

Cook this mixture all together for about a minute, then remove it from the heat. While the eggplants finish roasting, the balsamic vinegar will soak into your mushrooms.

Once the eggplants have finished roasting (about 20 minutes), mix them and the mushrooms together in a bowl.

Finished roasting: brown on the edges, with no spongy uncooked bits in the middle.

One of my favorite sights: roasted eggplant in a bowl. I could have eaten it just like this.

Mixing the eggplants and mushrooms together.

Add any additional salt if the dish requires. Top each individual serving with crumbled goat cheese and pepitas.

Tasty, wintry, Thanksgivingy... Christmasy?

I'm Stuffed

Here's a scenario that may resonate with some of you. Let's say you go to your favorite produce store and discover that they have a special display of the most gorgeous baby eggplants you've ever seen.

They're so tiny that you "aww" them in the grocery aisle. They're perfectly smooth, without a single blemish or bruise, like purple eggs laid by a magic goose. You can't resist and you take home three pounds of them.

Once you're back home, you discover that your fridge is as barren as an arctic tundra, pale as the full moon, and empty as the UChicago campus after 9pm. After wasting several minutes on absurd analogies for the emptiness of your fridge, you realize that you have three pounds of beautiful little eggplants and nothing to do with them. In desperation, you turn to your pantry, which contains:

-A package of round spring-roll skins that's been there for 2 years

-Approximately forty vietnamese egg noodle nests that someone gave you when they moved

-500 varieties of tea, 60% of which are flavors of chai

-Every baking ingredient in the world except flour

-A bottle of expired vitamins

-Rice, bulgur wheat, lentils, brewer's yeast, and a jar of Textured Vegetable Protein that's been there so long it's starting to smell like feet

-A can of tomato paste

But don't despair! Even with these limited ingredients, you can make THIS:

Roasted baby eggplants topped/stuffed with tomato bulgur.

This dish is similar to other forms of stuffed/topped eggplant, such as Imam Baldi and lentil-stuffed eggplant. Only this time, the topping is made with ingredients you probably already have around. You could substitute rice, couscous, or other grains from your pantry.

Ingredients

Baby eggplants (as many as you want)

Olive oil

1 onion, chopped

ca. 1 cup bulgur wheat

1 small can tomato paste 

A couple spoonfuls of water or broth

2 cloves garlic, crushed

Paprika

A squeeze of lime or lemon juice

Salt and pepper

Chopped parsley or cilantro to garnish

Cut the baby eggplants in half, coat them liberally in olive oil, and roast them in the oven, turning them over about halfway through the cooking time. (Temperature may vary, but 350 degrees F is a good starting point. This will take ca. 20-25 minutes.)

While the eggplants are baking, prepare the topping. In my experience, there are two kinds of bulgur wheat: the tiny grains used in tabbouleh, and the large-grained variety. The small grains can be re-hydrated merely by pouring boiling water over them, letting them sit for several minutes, then draining excess water. I used the larger grains, which have a nice chewy consistency. These take longer to cook and I've found that it's better to boil them in salt water, then drain and use. 

While rehydrating/boiling the bulgur wheat, fry the chopped onion in olive oil. Add tomato paste, garlic, and paprika and stir for 1-2 minutes until tomato paste has turned a slightly darker shade. Add bulgur wheat and a dash of water or broth, stir and simmer for several minutes. Remove from heat, add squeeze of lemon/lime juice, and salt/pepper to taste. 

When eggplants are done baking, top with bulgur. You can either pop these back into the oven for a few minutes, or you can eat them right away. Sprinkle with chopped parsley before serving.

Hurrah for improvisation!

Eggplants of Seattle: A Return Journey

A recent trip to the Seattle area was unexpectedly brimming with eggplants. Large eggplants, small eggplants, striped eggplants, white eggplants, orange eggplants -- it was a true aubergine bonanza. Er... an aubonanzargine?

Eggplant display at Pike Place Market

Those are eggplants?

These amazing striped orange eggplants are a special Turkish variety.

A glorious bounty.

For all the loveliness of these displays, my various relatives in the Seattle area have beautiful gardens of their own, and we feasted on home-grown eggplants rather than purchasing at the market. 

Tiny homegrown eggplants from my grandparents.

This one comes with its very own baby octopus.

My mother transformed an earlier crop into Imam Bayildi, or Turkish eggplants topped with a rich, partially caramelized tomato sauce.

Eggplants don't get much more colorful and delicious than this.

Thai Green Curry Soup with White Eggplants

Yesterday at my favorite produce store I saw white eggplants for the first time. They were about the size of baby eggplants or Italian eggplants, but with an intriguing white skin.

A while back I learned an easy shortcut for making delicious green curry OR green curry soup, so I decided to try using eggplants in the mix. The result, which only took about 20 minutes and tasted wonderful:

Most grocery stores sell jars of Thai curry paste, which tastes just like a restaurant-style curry when mixed with coconut milk. (I'm not convinced that most Thai restaurants make their own homemade curry seasoning, since the at-home version tastes so similar.) My favorite brand is Thai Kitchen, but there are usually lots to choose from.*

Since eggplants don't taste good when boiled in broth, I cooked them first in a pan. For an extra flavor-kick, I added a dash of lemongrass curry spice mix that I received as a gift -- but since that's not a common ingredient in the average kitchen, it's fine to omit it.

Tossed in the pan, before I added the oil. Use LOTS of oil. It's better that your curry is on the oily side, but with eggplants fully cooked, than rubbery undercooked eggplant. Most Asian restaurants deep-fry their eggplant slices, which gives them that creamy texture.

After sauteeing for a good long time: oil-soaked, browned at the edges, soft all the way through. I found the skin on the white eggplants to be tougher than usual, and the eggplant flesh to be a bit rubbery by nature, but the flavor is very sweet.

Remove the eggplants from the pan (to ensure that all the veggies cook enough -- no raw onion!). Saute slivers of onion and bell pepper until they're cooked the way you like them. Add the eggplant back into the pan and toss in some cubes of firm tofu. Add a dollop of curry paste (use to taste -- pastes vary in strength, so I won't give quantities here), and a dollop of broth paste or sprinkle of broth powder for extra flavor.

Here's where things get tricky: if you want this to be a curry, you can just add coconut milk, mix together, add more paste or broth if the flavor requires, and be done with it.

Just coconut curry, only a small amount of water. Great on top of rice.

If you'd rather make a soup, which is delicious with rice noodles, you can add more broth (or broth paste + water). That's what I did this time, and poured the mix over cooked rice noodles in the bottom of my single-serving bowl. If you plan on having leftovers, I wouldn't recommend adding the noodles directly to the soup. They tend to get soggy.

After adding more broth: it's soup! My favorite broth paste is Better than Bouillon (link above) and the best one for Asian cooking is the vegetarian chicken broth, called "No-Chicken." Caution vegetarians: they also have a real chicken variety!

The final product was yummy, rich, and full of tasty eggplant tidbits. The only downside: it's really not good cold, so expect to microwave your leftovers.





*Credit for this broth paste combo (Better than Bouillon Fake-Chicken + Thai Kitchen green curry) goes to the venerable and amazing Aunt Barb.

Mush + spices + oil = perfection every time

If you have a giant eggplant and you don't know what to do with it, why not try making a bowl of delicious, steaming mush?

It may sound gross, it may look gross, but it will taste absolutely delicious. When preparing eggplants, you can never go wrong with spices and garlic sauteed in oil, eggplant flesh roasted to mush, and a squeeze of lemon juice. You can experiment with whatever spices you want -- I find coriander and paprika go especially well with lemon -- but it will probably taste good nomatter what. 

This particular dish was prepared by roasting a halved eggplant, liberally doused in olive oil, until the flesh falls apart at the touch of a fork (about 30 minutes at 350 degrees). While letting the roasted eggplants cool, saute chopped onion and spices in olive oil. The spices I used this time were an especially tasty combo: smoked paprika, crushed urfa chiles, and tomato powder. While the onions cook, pull the skins off the eggplant flesh and remove any large, bulging seed pockets. Roughly chop/mash the eggplant with a knife. About a minute before putting the eggplant in the pan, add 1-2 cloves of crushed garlic to the oil. Then dump in the eggplant, mix it with the oil and spices, and add lemon juice and salt to taste. Top with your favorite fresh herbs (parsley or cilantro work well). 

Here served with olives, watermelon-tomato-cucumber-mint salad, and chickpea scallion patties.

Great on pita, or crackers, or just eat it with a fork.

You can vary this recipe to suit the contents of your spice cabinet. You can also dub your newly created dish something sexier than  "bowl of spiced mush," although that's essentially what it is. No shame in that.

India House: Home of Artery-Clogging Goodness

A couple weeks ago I went to India House, a restaurant in downtown Chicago. I'm so predictable that of course I ordered baingan bharta (the creamy, smoky eggplant dish I have made in the past, accompanied by a co-chef who is sadly also past history).

Regarding this dish: a good friend of mine, Lana, sent me photos of her own chana masala and baingan bharta, based on the recipe provided in the blog. Her char-roasted eggplants look amazing. Thanks, Lana!

Baingan bharta is usually creamy and buttery. The way India House makes it takes creaminess to a new level, such that I alternated between gobbling it up like a rabid beast and clutching my stomach with pain.

A series of delicious dishes, with eggplant in the middle, all of which are basically the same color for some reason.

Don't forget the chutneys!

You can see the ghee pooling on the surface.

Overall, I would say that this bharta is totally delicious, but so rich that you can only eat a small amount. If I ate any more than that, I felt similar to the time I recklessly ordered a slice of cake AND a milkshake in a diner -- that is to say, disgusting.

Finally, as long as I'm on the topic of Indian food, I'd like to share the exciting news:

I just fermented stuff for the first time! AND I'M STILL ALIVE!

I made Indian lime-pickle from scratch, and it turned out great. Wedges of lime with vinegar, turmeric, mango powder, and tons of salt sat on the countertop for five weeks. Then I mixed it with spices and oil in a pan and voila!

The fermented limes with oil and spices, briefly cooked on the stovetop.

Let it sit for a few more days, and it's ready to eat! Delicious!

I made an Indian dinner to accompany my pickle: rasaam soup and garbanzo-pea-sweet-potato stew, along with rice and yogurt.

A feast! But there's not an eggplant in sight, so this is clearly a lengthy non-sequitur.

And with that, I'm going to Germany. So long, farewell, aufwiedersehen, goodnight!