... and several months later, another homemade Indian feast!

This poor blog has gone somewhat to seed, not unlike the lakefront park this morning:

Meanwhile, I am now the proud owner of an Aubergenius-themed apron thanks to the generosity of my blog's most loyal reader, my very own grandmother... but alas, I feel ashamed to don the apron given the scarcity of posts in the last several months. I have looked at eggplants, purchased eggplants, admired eggplants, chopped eggplants, prepared and even eaten eggplants many times since the last entry, but for some reason my desire to post photos and glib commentary has waned.

Nonetheless, I had an amazing feast prepared by none other than my piano teacher, Amy Briggs, who is as phenomenal a cook as she is pianist and teacher. She single-handedly made several different curries, veggies, dal, and a homemade VEGAN raita (made from tofu and surprisingly refreshing). And of course eggplant was among the spread:

Clockwise from left: saffron rice, green beans with mustard seeds, potato and cauliflower curry, dal, eggplant, and raita.

A bird's-eye (or hungry-piano-student's-eye) view.

It was quite a cooking extravaganza.

The amazing chef!

Overall, a very impressive and totally delicious (and totally vegan!) meal.

Homemade Indian Feast

I'll admit, I'm not always in the mood to experiment with new eggplant recipes. Sometimes you're in the store, you see a gleaming eggplant, you stick in the basket, and when you get home all you want is the same exact curry you made the previous week.

For blogging purposes, this kind of cooking redundancy can be problematic. Being the self-proclaimed Aubergenius, I'm supposed to hunt down every eggplant recipe I can find, try cooking each one, tinker, improve, explore, post, rinse, repeat.

But lately, given frigid temperatures and a busy schedule, all I ever want is the quick eggplant-chickpea curry I featured a couple posts ago. My awesome co-chef Zoë and I made a true Indian feast a couple weeks ago, perfect to combat the Chicago winter.

Engrossed in conversation. Co-chef, if you're reading this, pardon the candid paparazza shot.

In addition to the eggplant curry and rice, we had homemade tortillas (courtesy of my mother, who made them on her last visit and stored them in my freezer), spiced okra with roasted fingerling potatoes, carrot-ginger-coriander slaw, homemade cilantro-mint chutney (a Zoë specialty), yogurt, lime pickle, and brinjal eggplant relish.

A feast!

It was one of the best homemade meals I've had in a long time. And goes to show that whether or not you're trying out new recipes, cooking for other people brings out your ambitious side. Plus, the spirit and cheer makes everything taste even better. 

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.