Wednesday, December 25, 2013

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?