South Indian spinach and eggplant

I can't pretend that I'm making real South Indian food here. Total haole (Hawai'ian for foreigner/white person). What I can say is that I adapted a common spice combination in South Indian dishes to some local ingredients I found at the farmer's market:

First, a note about South Indian flavors. The North Indian recipes I've posted thus far are flavored with spices like garam masala (itself a mix of warm flavors like cloves, cinnamon, and peppercorns among many other ingredients), ground coriander, and tomatoes. Onions, garlic, and ginger are common to recipes in both North and South. What distinguishes South Indian flavors is an emphasis on earthy and herbal aromatics: curry leaves (which taste sharp and peppery, a mix of mild green chili with arugula with bay leaf), mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds and/or leaves, turmeric, shredded coconut, tangy yogurt. Less warm and creamy, more peppery and bright and a little bitter. (In a good way.)

So with my [admittedly limited haole] knowledge of South Indian cooking, I made this:

Eggplant and Spinach curry
with coconut milk and South Indian spices
delicious on rice or piled on top of bread
and if you can't find Indian bread, use thick style tortillas, it's alllllmost a chapati and still tastes great

Ingredients

Flavorful oil
oil of your choice (I used avocado oil; coconut oil is also great)
small spoonful of cumin seeds
half spoonful of fenugreek
half spoonful of black mustard seeds
1-2 dried red chiles, broken into pieces
12 or so fresh curry leaves*

*I find these at the farmer's market, lucky me. If you can't find them fresh, you might procure some frozen or dried in an Indian grocery.

Also allegedly they are good for your heart and keep your hair from going gray, so I predict that Whole Foods with catch on and market curry leaves as a new superfood. Called it.

Further aromatics
1 onion, diced
6 cloves garlic, diced
3-inch piece of ginger, peeled and diced

Spices
half spoonful ground turmeric (or use fresh turmeric root if you wish!)
half spoonful ground coriander
half spoonful ground red chili/cayenne, to taste based on desired spice level

Veggies
eggplant(s), variety of your choice, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 lb spinach

Extras
fresh cilantro
yogurt
rice
chutneys and pickles and things

A pile o' spices.

Method
Before you start, I recommend prepping some ingredients, since things will go in the oil in quick succession. Cut up the onion, ginger, and garlic and have it ready on the side.

Aromatics waiting their turn.

Start by popping cumin seeds, fenugreek, and dried chili in oil. The start of every good thing.

After the cumin is sizzling nicely, about a minute, add the mustard seeds. These will pop right out of the pan, so maybe you'll prefer to make this dish in an enclosed pot. Both work fine.

As the mustard seeds are popping, add the curry leaves and onions. Cook until onions are golden—and DON'T use as much curry leaf as you see pictured here. The package at the farmer's market comes with an insane quantity and I got overambitious. The dish would have been improved with a lighter hand.

It's a strong flavor. I happen to love it, so this is a good amount of curry leaf for me, but most people would find this absurd.

Add the eggplants, ginger, and garlic, and a small dash of water. Cover the pan to catch the steam and let eggplants soften, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes.

Right after they went in. They take a while to soften up. You can cook them in advance—sauté, instant pot, microwave, whatever—if you want to speed up the prep time.

When eggplants are getting there but not quite done, add the other spices and continue to cook eggplants, adding water and covering the lid until they're pretty soft.

Looking good.

Then add the spinach; it doesn't take long to cook, not more than 5 minutes. Salt the dish generously and add half a can of coconut milk right at the end. Continue salting to taste until it's just right.

Spinach mostly done.

And voilà.

Enjoy with rice, yogurt, and the pleasant company of a bizarre cactus berry that appeared recently on my patio plant.

Southwestern Baba Ganoush

Yes, it's entirely fictional. This is another variety of eggplant mush, but this time different from the Mediterranean mushes I've posted before. It's smoky, creamy, spicy, tangy, salty. It's equally at home on a tortilla chip, a cracker, and a slice of rustic bread.

Here it should be mentioned that mashing roasted eggplants is a time-honored tradition, the food of kings. Take for instance this fascinating YouTube documentary about re-creating a 15th-century Moorish eggplant recipe from a cookbook that belonged to the chef for Ferdinand I, King of Naples. (Watch it with closed captioning to see English subtitles.) I tip my hat to a friend who shared this link with me recently, and now I'm dying to read the poem in which two women compete for who knows the most eggplant recipes. But on a less intellectual note, this video is just plain eggplant porn.

My Southwestern Baba is not quite as exquisite as a 15th-century eggplant masterpiece drizzled with flowers. It's that appetizer you bring in a tupperware to the party and everyone says, "what is that stuff?" and you flip your hair and say "oh that? it's delectable mush" or maybe "some weird thing that's not a real dish but it tastes better than it looks." It's addictive.

This recipe makes about 5x this amount, but what a cute widdwe bowlie.

Ingredients
1 large eggplant, halved and roasted with olive oil at 380°
2 hatch chiles, roasted whole until blackened
1 jalapeño, see above
3 cloves garlic, chopped
a 2-inch chunk of chevre (soft goat cheese)
two generous dollops of Greek yogurt
smallish blip of mayo (optional for extra creaminess)
~1/2 tsp chipotle in adobo sauce or chipotle-flavored hot sauce (adjust to taste based on desired spice level; I used quite a bit more than this)
~1 tsp Cholula
~1/2 tsp ground cumin
~1/2 tsp ground paprika {you guys know I hate measuring quantities. It's a rustic blog. Use however much looks right and that goes for everything always}
olive oil
squeeze of fresh lime
chopped cilantro
2 chopped scallions
salt and pepper to taste (recommended: use smoked salt!)

Method 
Start by roasting the eggplants and various chiles in the oven at 380° until the eggplant is mushy-soft and chiles are blackened. Remove the skins once the roasted things have cooled. Chop with a knife until roughly mashed.

Before.

After.

Put the mush in a small mixing bowl.

In a small pan, fry the garlic in a generous quantity of olive oil. Watch it like a hawk and don't let it burn. When it looks slighly golden, add cumin and paprika and fry for one more minute or less; don't let the spices burn either! Pour the hot oil and garlic into the mush.

The fragrant part.

Mix in the remaining ingredients, first the goat cheese to let it dissolve into the mush, then the other items. Add a squeeze of lime, salt, and any additional hot sauce to taste. Mix in fresh greenery right at the end and serve with green things scattered on top. Eat warm or cold on top of any carb-like thing you desire.

Goat cheese, orchid cheese? NOOO no more puns no more.

Melanzane di Roma

During a recent trip to Europe I stopped in Rome for a weekend to eat eggplants  visit a friend. Shout out to one Jess Peritz for the delectable food tour, and all the various restaurant tips that follow.

Italy is still untapped eggplant territory for me. Three years ago I spent a few days wandering around Florence and Venice with my mother, and naturally we were stunned by the architecture—especially Venice, which feels like the CGI set of a high-budget fantasy film. But alas, we were both disappointed with the food. I recall her saying at the time, "my wish in Italy is to try the most delicious marinara I've ever tasted." What a reasonable request! As usual in touristy cities, if don't know someone to show you around, you get caught in the tourist flytrap—you can try to fight it, but you'll end up eating a plate of mediocre, overpriced pasta you could make at home. And sure enough, our most successful food experience was buying ripe tomatoes from a farmstand and munching them like (golden) apples. The marinara remained elusive.

That's why I was excited to visit a friend in Rome who escorted me to the best nightshades. I found a stark contrast between food culture here vs. major cities Germany and Austria where I spend more of my time. In Vienna, Berlin, even mid-sized cities like Leipzig, there's been an explosion of ethnic restaurants for decades, and it's even more pronounced since the influx of migrants. You can find ten different world cuisines in a single city block, not unlike NYC. But in Italy, food = Italian food. One could view that as pride, justly deserved, in the local cuisine. One could also view it as conservatism and a lack of adventurous tastes. I wasn't in Italy long enough to make that judgment—just long enough to eat delicious things and enjoy every moment of it.

My visit was inaugurated with a Neapolitan-style pizza at a place called La Gatta Mangiona, widely considered to serve some of the best pizza in Rome and also cat-themed. Yes, friends, the decor is made up entirely of pictures of cats.

Roasted eggplant, zucchini, roasted and marinated green peppers, and mozzarella. 

I learned that the typical Neapolitan pizza is lighter and fluffier than other kinds, baked at an extremely hot temp so that it burns on the outside while remaining soft on the inside. Eating a whole one of these is not difficult because it's mostly air in there. (And because it's, um, delectable.)

In-between eggplant meals, we enjoyed eating suppli, a Roman street food. Balls of tomato risotto (or... more like tomatoey arborio rice that's not fully risottified) are stuffed with a cube of cheese, breaded in a cornmeal coating, and deep fried. They are dense and unhealthy and amazing—and the best place to get them in Rome, along with an incredible assortment of baked goods, is Roscioli. They sell out fast, so get there early and grab them while supplies last. (Pun absolutely intended.)

The highlight was my first time finally trying a true pasta alla norma. I've been wanting to cook this famous Sicilian dish and post a recipe to Aubergenius for ages, but I'd never tried a good version in a restaurant and I didn't know what to aim for. This rendition was served at Meridionale, an unassuming, homestyle place with hip decor in the neighborhood of Trastevere.

Before.

After.

It's true what everyone says about Italian food. It's simple, understated, and the star of every dish is the ingredients. My pasta alla norma was so straightforward. It was long pasta (fatter than spaghetti, rounder than linguine, so I guess it was a Pinottini?) with intensely tomatoey tomato sauce. Interestingly, many Italians dislike garlic, so the sauce had scarcely perceptible garlic flavor; Americans think that's what Italian cooking is all about, but they're wrong. Mixed in were chunks of roasted or sautéed eggplant, velvety soft and flavored with strong olive oil, topped with ricotta salata, a mild, fresh, salty cheese. Most of the salt came from the cheese on top; in fact, most Italian food is way less sugary and salty than the American version. It just tastes like tomatoey freshness and olive oil.

On my last day in Italy, I indulged in this sandwich from Trapizzino, a portmanteau of the triangular sandwich "tramezzino" and a pizza. (Plus: they deliver!)

Exactly what it looks like: eggplant, tomato sauce, mozzarella in a crusty bread. Exactly what it tastes like: HOW CAN SUCH SIMPLE THINGS BE SO GOOD?? Italian cuisine in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, since I was visiting a friend and fellow eggplant-lover at the American Academy, I enjoyed strolling through their backyard gardens, abundant with eggplants of all kinds. The gardens supply the Academy kitchen with a good portion of its ingredients. Lucky fellows at the academy spend their year eating gourmet meals made with local produce, part of the Rome Sustainable Food Project spearheaded by Alice Waters. Keeping those fellows jolly and good.

Big fat globe eggplants.

Easter egg eggplants (almost as redundant as an ATM machine).

Gardens, grounds, and some guy in blue who's pretty stoked.

And why wouldn't he be? One of many scenic corners of the academy in morning light. Not pictured: two live hedgehogs I saw right there in that very spot (at night though).

In the Rome airport, I said my Abschied to Italian eggplants with a little tiny panino filled with roasted eggplant and artichoke-lemon spread. I forgot how well eggplants and artichokes go together.

Airport food in Rome. Yep.

The tiniest sammy.

My only regret is that I couldn't bring my mother—blog's most loyal reader and home cook extraordinaire—along to taste a real Italian marinara.


IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Nary a Marinara

A friend, musicologist, and self-professed saucerer (badum-tsch) from Italy has chimed in with some interesting and important sauce-related info. The concept of marinara, as it turns out, is more American than Italian—well, I'll let Claudio tell you in his words:

• Claudio: Marinara sauce is an Italian-American invention, based on the very same kinds of culinary fantasies/misunderstandings you mention in your post (lots of garlic to cover the poor taste of mediocre tomatoes).
• Yours truly: Here I also have a point of ignorance where I thought marinara was a broad umbrella term for tomato sauce. What do you usually call tomato sauce to differentiate it from marinara? (Like what would you call the sauce on a pasta alla norma?)
• Claudio: There are different ways of using tomato sauce according to the recipes you are making. In Tuscany we use the term "salsa di pomodoro" to indicate a basic tomato sauce made with a base of sautéd carrots, celery, onion, strained tomatoes and (optional) basil. If you make pasta all'arrabbiata (transl. as "angry pasta") then we'd use finely chopped garlic, hot chili, and parsley, in addition to the strained tomatoes. When I make amatriciana (which would not be suitable for non-carnivores), then I revert to onion (without carrots and celery this time) and chili. Different regions have different ways of using their tomato sauce. In northern Italy, the sauce is often sautéd in butter, which is blasphemy in the central and southern regions, whose cuisine is much more olive-oil based. There is no consensus among Italians on how to call what Tuscans label "salsa di pomodoro." In Milan they call the same thing "sugo," which in Tuscany is a meat-based sauce (very similar to ragù alla bolognese, with some variants).

Yours truly again: I'm glad to have Italian friends who can set me straight. The main points I took away are:

1) There is so much local variation in food in Italy that maybe there's no such thing as "Italian" food to begin with. I remember the story an Italian literature PhD student told me once: when she was in Italy, she noticed that teenagers would take jars of their mom's sauce in their suitcases even when they were visiting a neighboring town. Because, presumably, the town next door wouldn't make things quite the same. So when Americans mix up suppli with arancini, to us a rice-ball is a rice-ball; but to the Italian sensibility it's a significant error because so much local variation gets whitewashed/marinara-washed by American tastes.

2) Without a truly stellar quality of ingredients, perhaps there's no point in making or eating Italian cuisine in America. You can make Italian-American food, though. Load up the garlic and cook that marinara to death! Because if your tomatoes aren't superb, if your pasta's not perfectly cooked, if your dough's the wrong consistency, if your olive oil tastes like BPAs, if your cheese tastes like cornstarch, if your risotto's a glue and your pesto's pale—then go to Eataly I guess?

3) O, the humble aubergine! Nomatter how plasticky the tomatoes are, the aubergine remains delicious most everywhere. With some good olive oil, a lovely roasted surface, a sprinkling of salt and a leaf of basil on top, ecco!

Homemade eggplant masala

An exciting thing has happened. Ever since I started a new job, became a grown-up, and bought a grown-up Instant Pot, I'm cooking Indian food from scratch almost every week.

For those who don't know about it: the Instant Pot is a glorified pressure cooker that has taken on a cult following in many culinary corners, especially among Indian home cooks. It has been described as a liberating gadget that allows busy working moms to pull together family meals in no time. (Probably some busy working dads are involved, too.) For those who cook meat, I can imagine the IP makes laborious recipes newly accessible. For vegetarians like me, it's a tool for cooking dry beans with virtually no soaking, steaming beets, creating flavorful veggie broths, chili, dal, rice pudding and who knows what else. I've become a bit obsessed.

The key is to join a Facebook group like this one. Inspiration galore:

Last night my music trio played a mini-concert for their families and I made an Indian feast to celebrate. On the plate were Punjabi-style dishes and one item from Kerala, all vegan, all gluten free, healthy and delish:

• Eggplant masala, the featured dish of this post
• Dal makhani 
• Erissery, or pumpkin and bean curry
• Carrot salad, yogurt, chutneys, the works

A trio of delicious curries.

Bringing together two of my favorite things: music and stuffing my face.

The eggplant masala might not be a real dish (?) but who's counting. I first made a big batch of onion masala sauce from this awesome blog—note that this sauce can be made ahead and frozen in small batches to whip out on a weeknight. Then I halved and roasted these little eggplants in the oven, mixed it all together, dumped in some frozen peas and voilà.

I made the sauce already the night before. Easy peasy.

The other two dishes turned out great too, but I might not make South Indian food that often due to the challenge of procuring good fresh coconut. IN HAWAI'I. What?? I'm as baffled as you are. I hacked open a coconut in my parking lot only to find it was putrid inside, returned it to the store, and the manager opened every last one to find me a replacement, and even the freshest of them still smelled slightly of soap. Shouldn't this be the single easiest thing to procure on a tropical island?

It makes a good backdrop to the eggplant, though.

The dal recipe can be found here. For the Erissery, provided by a home cook without a blog, you'll have to join that Facebook group. I like having both North and South Indian flavors on the same plate. Punjabi dishes have that warming comfort-food quality, with coriander and garam-masala and tomato and onion, while the South Indian flavors are more pungent and aromatic, coconut and yogurt and curry leaves and mustard seed. Maybe a next step in my Instant Pot training is to hone in on a single region instead of a smorgasbord.

And if you're hankering for carrot salad:
Peel and shred a bag of carrots. Add olive oil, lime juice, about 20 crushed coriander seeds, 2 sliced scallions, salt to taste, and chopped cilantro.

Meanwhile, I shouldn't get too cocky about my Indian cooking skills. I'm a haole with a lot of room for growth. But the flautist did just e-mail me, "thanks for one of the best meals I've had in a while. Really tasty!!"

Let's relay the thanks to its proper recipient: Indian home cooks on social media.

Creamy Comfort Soup: Lemongrass, Turmeric, Ginger, need I continue

Today was another one of those days when I roamed around the pantry, improvised a dish, and felt exceptionally pleased with myself. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

With assorted ingredients I already had, I made a lemongrass curry soup with homegrown baby eggplants.

It turned out even better than I expected. Here's how to make it; as always, feel free to substitute ingredients at will, depending on what you have around:

Ingredients
2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 stalk lemongrass, tough leaves and outer hull removed, tender part sliced thin
1-2 tsp turmeric powder
4 kefir lime leaves
2 bay leaves
ground black pepper
1/2 sweet onion, slivered
1/2 block firm tofu, cubed
a handful of baby eggplants or any eggplants you have, cut in 1-inch pieces
red bell pepper (here: dehydrated, because it's what I had lying around)
1 can coconut milk
1 tbsp coconut oil
Better than Bouillon-brand mushroom base, to taste (~1 tbsp)
noodles (rice or wheat; pictured here are local saimin noodles)

Optional: Thai basil if you have some. My basil bolted and it's practically a tree now.

Method

Sauté onions, [bell pepper if using], ginger, and leaves in coconut oil until slightly browned. Add garlic and eggplants and sauté for a minute more, then add a good amount of water (a little over half the amount of broth you want at the end, or ~4 cups); add tofu, turmeric, black pepper, and broth paste.

Cover and let boil until eggplants are softened, ~5 minutes. Add noodles OR cook noodles separately in boiling water and hold aside for serving.

Technically you shouldn't boil saimin (wheat) noodles directly in the broth, since it makes them gummy. But I was hungry so I did it anyway. Do it the right way in polite company.

After the noodles were done.

Once the noodles are cooked, add the can of coconut milk. Add extra broth paste or salt if needed. Otherwise, serve up and enjoy.

Glistening with yumminess.

Black Garlic: Experiments and Delectable Failures

This post will eventually be about black garlic, the hot new culinary trend on the menus of fancy restaurants everywhere. But first: a sappy and quaint introduction!

The eggplant growing on my lanai has become a metaphor for my life here in Hawai'i and for my cooking exploits of late.

It started strong, cranking out blossoms and fruits right and left. Gradually the challenges of its new position wore it down so that it looked a bit threadbare. (Being eaten by spider mites is not unlike a prof after a busy teaching week, returning home at 10pm in a pencil skirt and collapsing onto the carpet, unable to make it to the couch. Then feebly sniffed at by a passing cat.) But the eggplant kept chugging and chugging, and still covered in spider mites, it put out new blossoms and branches and a fruit or two. I admire its persistence. If we all just find a way to emulate the eggplant, we'll be in great shape.

Leaves marbled by spider mites sucking all the juice from its veins. But flowers anyway. Good on ya.

My latest cooking experiment, like the eggplant on the lanai, combined failure + dogged determination.

It all starts with black garlic. My amazing mother, who really ought to be the one blogging, found a way to turn her homegrown garlic bulbs into homemade black garlic. It takes weeks in a rice cooker to ferment/caramelize. The result is Halloween-black, wrinkly, sticky, gooey, and delicious. It tastes like roasted garlic x10, a sort of onioney molasses. 

My mom is considering going into full production with this, so if you are a gourmet chef in the Seattle area who needs a local, organic, homemade and homegrown source of the highest quality black garlic: e-mail me and I will hook you up.

I really should leave it to the professionals. My attempt to make a gourmet black garlic eggplant dish was a delectable failure. I was going for a presentation that projected casual nonchalance, ingredients beautifully strewn across the platter, a sliver of lemon here, a smear of sauce there, a dash of herbs...

...and ended up with a tutti frutti nightmare of clashing colors like a dress from the 1980s that you cackle at in the thrift store.

Yes.

Would you like to see that up close?

Yes!

Would a different angle make it any better?

Oh wow.

Obviously I'm not proud of how this recipe looks... but it tasted pretty great.

On a serious note, here's what I learned about cooking with black garlic. It's actually much milder than you might expect. For all its dark richness in appearance, it's a muted flavor that needs to be paired with neutral ingredients like yogurt. I ended up making a black garlic tahini sauce with a squeeze of lemon, and while I found it delicious in many ways, even the flavor of the tahini overpowered the garlic a bit. Yogurt would be better. (I also messed up this sauce further by putting in a dash of pomegranate molasses, which was nice in theory but overpowered the whole thing.)

I also learned that black garlic is so sticky that it adheres to food processor blades. It should be crushed up into a paste with some water before grinding.

The other sauce is neon green and delicious a.f.

It's made from grinding up tons of fresh parsley, a dollop of yogurt, lemon juice, and salt.

Additional successes on this tutti frutti were: pine nuts coated in agave syrup and tossed in a pan until they become candied. Fried red jalapeño slivers. Perfect baby eggplants that we found at the Indian grocery, pictured here.

Coated in oil, smoked salt, and paprika. 

Roasted and ready to rumble.

There was a lot of potential packed into this odd assortment of things on a platter. Each component could go in an interesting, delicious direction in some other dish. So it's an experimental first start towards delectable things to come.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to experiment with black garlic and post the results next time. And shake off my spider mites and put out some more blossoms, etc. etc. < / quaintness >