Like, for example, putting a dollop of harissa in a sauté pan and accidentally breathing capsaicin into your lungs. Whoopsy daisy!
Hacking cough aside, I was so excited to find harissa now available at Trader Joe's. It's tasty stuff, too. In celebration, I roasted two giant eggplants and sauteed the mushy insides in olive oil with:
Onion
Garlic
Turmeric
Coriander
Paprika
Harissa
I added salt to taste, a generous squeeze of lemon juice, a dollop of tahini for creaminess, and cilantro. Voilà, another spicy relish, and super delish.
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| Great with bread, pita, crackers, etc. etc. the usual. |
This is actually just the eggplant version of a different dish I made recently. (I want to say I invented this recipe, but I'm sure someone else somewhere has thought of it.) I made a kind of spicy Mediterranean potato salad with boiled potatoes (the waxy kind that don't get mushy), diced cucumber and tomatoes, red onion, parsley, green olives, lemon juice, harissa, and tahini. And of course salt and pepper to taste, a swoop of olive oil, and sumac sprinkled on top. It was totally delicious.
Since life is crazy right now, I've developed a bit of a backlog: a few eggplant photos lying around, but little time to make these into entries that are even remotely enjoyable to read. So this post will function as ketchup (er... catch-up). I'm sacrificing wit, humor, whimsy, spark, gall, witz and glitz. In return, you get: another recipe idea.
BREAKING NEWS
My garden was a total fail this year. So bad. The eggplant is producing a few more little eggs, but everything is bitter and terrible and dying. The tomato plant has practically turned into a pillar of salt. The tomatillos are putting out zillions of flowers and turning into tiny hard tomatillo-nuggets that never get bigger, or ripen, and for some reason they all taste the way grasshoppers smell. The only plant that's doing well is my random bushy thing I got as a birthday present for a friend, who then gave it back to me when he almost killed it:
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| She's a thing of beauty. |
My one miracle of life in the last month: a single pepper. I had the pleasure of watching it morph from a poblano to an ancho.
A while back I got two more bitter, sad eggplants on my balcony. I mixed them with storebought and made a delicious quasi-Japanesey stir fry with
Roasted eggplant pieces
Lacinato kale
Miso paste
Ginger, garlic, scallions
Rice vinegar
Sesame oil
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| Something is better than nothing. |
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| The very best matchsticks. |
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| Adding to the kale, then sauce on top, a little more stir-frying and done. |
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| Yum. Delicious on rice. I also ate it on couscous... not terribly Japanese, but tasty anyway. |
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| Auberginescapes. |
That's all for now. Disappearing back into the job/dissertation gopher hole. Wish me luck!
