Black garlic baba ghanoush + dolmas + red oil butter beans + pita = MID EAST FEAST

 

This is what I ate last night. Jealous?

An extra silky, rich, deluxe version of my pomegranate baba ghanoush with 3 cloves of black garlic substituted for the usual 1 clove of raw. Mash the black garlic into a paste with a flat knife before adding to the mix. Top with sumac and za'atar in an overbearing and distracting design.

A batch of dolmas made with this recipe, which turns out great every time. The water boiled off faster than I expected and they ended up browning on the bottom, but weirdly enough they were even more delicious that way, like toasted dolmas. I might mess this up on purpose next time.

A big pan of Ottolenghi's butter beans in red oil, with a few modifications. My spin-off: way less preserved lemon, way less oil, way more tomato paste, add sliced celery, don't bother with the last step re: grated tomato unless you really want.

Homemade pitas baked by a roommate. I am a dreadful baker and can't take credit. *hat tip*

We ate all this with Armenian braided string cheese. Leftovers taste even better. 

In pandemic world, I like to spend as little leisure time on screens as possible. All blog posts henceforth will be astonishingly short until 30% or more of my life is conducted offscreen. 

Embarrassing confession #141: I ate 10 dolmas this morning for breakfast.

Embarrassing confession #142: I lost count, actually, so it could easily have been 12. 

Grilling for n00bs + three refreshing cold soups

If you want the short story:
Slice lengthwise and thin, brush liberally with olive oil, cross-hatch if the slices are too thick, sprinkle with salt and balsamic or pepper or BBQ sauce or ginger soy marinade or peri peri sauce or chermoula or whatever the heck you want, grill, flip, grill, NOM.

If you're a grilling n00b like I am, here's the longer story:

Experienced grillers say it's easy. I think grilling is tricky. I recently inherited a little mini charcoal grill and its dimensions make it hard to get the briquettes aglow. ("STAY LIT for the love of all that is charcoaly" etc.) If you're grilling with propane, it's just the turn of a knob, and veggies are a breeze (meat is another story). If your charcoal grill is small and shallow, though, the wind blows in and it takes some doing to get the coals hot.

Charcoal woes? DOS AND DON'TS
DO put a relatively thin layer of charcoal, shaped like a volcano in the middle (a little goes a long way)
DON'T overstuff, the oxygen can't get in
DO douse gently but not absurdly in lighter fluid and carefully light each contact spot without getting too close
DON'T use half a bottle of lighter fluid just because it's stubbornly not lighting and create a giant fireball that makes the neighbors come out to ask if everything's ok [NB this particular fireball was not mea culpa]
DO use firestarting squares if you're having trouble
DON'T add a bunch more lighter fluid and use extreme caution if you do need to add more, otherwise you can burn your face off
DON'T use lighter fluid to fashion a daring circus adventure hoop for cats and small dogs to leap through, it shall not end well*

*no animals were harmed in the grilling of these vegetables except a surplus of yellowjackets

Is it ready yet?
When most of the briquettes are turning white around the edges and you see some orange glow beneath, and when you feel a good heat coming off the grill, it's go time. If your grill is dirty, scrape off the gunk with your brush once the temp is up.

But whatever shall I grill?
How about this cornucopia of farmer's market veggies?

Good to grill:
-Eggplants of smaller size will work better than giant ones; the smaller the size, the faster they cook
-If your farmer's market sells baskets full of thin-skinned sweet peppers and zesty Japanese shishitos, you are in luck, because you can brush them in oil and grill them whole, and they taste fab with nothing but a sprinkling of salt
-Young sweet onions, halved
-A zucchini from my garden *beams with pride*
-A patty pan from my garden *ibid.

If you take away only one thing from this post, it is: I'm verbose. Oh, and, cut stuff thin and lengthwise.

Brush with olive oil. If you have some flavorful salts, this is what they were born to do. The salt pictured is from Big Island of Hawai'i (Salty Wahine brand) and adds amazing flavor to everything it touches.

You can grill as-is, or douse with balsamic as I did, or brush with other sauces and marinades. Just make sure your sauces don't have things that taste bitter when burned. Garlic can give flavor to the sauce, but don't leave chunks on there to char.

Another solid option: Pour a tangy dressing or marinade on top when the veggies are done, and they soak it up like a sponge and taste like pickly antipasti. 

Fat slices of things should get cross-hatched so the oil and heat get in.

If you can find these baby onions, you can cook them straight on the grill and they cook through; if your onions are too big, cut them smaller and cook in foil.

Japanese shishito peppers: brush with olive oil and blister the surface, then sprinkle generously with salt. 

With this farmer's market feast, I also made cold soups that are perfect for summer, not pictured here because they don't contain Aubergines.

APPENDIX: Cold Soup Brief
Are you sweating buckets? Gross. Why would you fess up to that.
Good news: it's chilled soup time.

#1: best ever gazpacho, and no, it's not just a runny salsa / virgin bloody mary like you're used to.
Yes, it is worth the extra steps of emulsifying the olive oil slowly while the blades are running and then straining through a sieve. Yes, you should use a very mild onion and pepper, not a robust green bell that overwhelms. This is the most creamy, savory, refreshing, addictive vegan thing I've ever had. It is vital to use the highest quality tomatoes you can find, plus a good strong olive oil.

You don't have to throw away the solids if you don't want. They make a great base for Punjabi onion masala.

I ate it all in a day and a half. It was worth the heartburn.

#2: buttermilk beet borscht. Refreshing, tangy, salty, and a shade of fuchsia that belongs in Willy Wonka's R&D lab. This is a family recipe for which there is no real recipe, so I'm just writing the approximate summary here.

Buttermilk borscht: 
Beets, steamed and peeled and boiled, or peeled and boiled, however you usually make borscht broth. Blend the beets into the broth using an immersion blender BUT FIRST leave out two beets, which you can chop into chunks and add after. That is: 75% blended, 25% chunky.
Add sour salt (or lemon juice), sugar, salt to taste. Achieve the right balance of sweet, salty, sour, but go easy on the sour because buttermilk is also tart. (If you don't have sour salt, do not substitute cider vinegar. It seems like it'll be fine but it just tastes nasty.)
When it cools to room temp, add fresh dill and buttermilk—enough to make it a vivid pink color. Chill overnight.

#3: cucumber yogurt soup. Creamy with a protein kick for starved vegetarians.
Contains: chopped cucumber, runny yogurt, lemon, dill, garlic, walnuts, salt, pepper. That's basically it. The walnuts add a great texture in the bottom of the bowl. This soup is kinda Georgian, kinda Bulgarian, but somewhat of a knock-off of those cuisines since their yogurt products are so different from ours.

AND NOW
n00bs of all kinds can get grilling and chilling.

Auber-TAGINE with chickpeas and preserved lemons + apricot couscous

Since my last post, I started a challenging new job that absorbed my full attention. Then the pandemic swept the world (and keeps on sweeping), and now waves of activism are reviving the spirit of 1964.

In the midst of dizzying change, cities on fire, and a virus on the loose, it's... weird... to post a tagine recipe. But since virtually no one reads this blog anyway, and since food and cooking are my main way of coping with anxiety, this post happened. Flippant towards the state of the world, perhaps, but maybe we need comfort food right now.

I inherited this beautiful ceramic tagine from a colleague who was packing up to move overseas. It has been sitting on top of my fridge for a year, gathering dust, and today it finally embarked on its maiden voyage.

The tagine is basically like a Moroccan slow-cooker. The steam drifts up in the cone and falls back down, and over time, you transform artfully layered ingredients into a stew with a thick sauce. Here's more on how to use a tagine, and if you're interested in buying one, make sure you also buy a heat diffuser to prevent the ceramic from cracking.

Rather than follow a single recipe, my tagine riffed off of several different recipes, none of which involved the beautiful layering that is common for this dish. All the recipes I found used the tagine much more like a crock pot, and in retrospect I don't think any of the online recipes were really Moroccan. So consider this a first experiment, with more glamorous tagines to follow once I get my hands on a proper Moroccan cookbook.

That raku
is homemade, too!

Eggplant and chickpea tagine
with apricot couscous

Ingredients (guesstimated as always)
1 red onion, chopped coarsely
4 cloves garlic, sliced
1 eggplant, coarse chunks
1 zucchini, coarse chunks (optional)
1/2 fennel bulb, sliced
1 cup dried chickpeas, cooked in advance, OR 1 can chickpeas (include some cooking water)
1 1/2 cans diced tomatoes
3 dates, thinly sliced
harissa to taste (depends on preferred spice level)
1-2 tsp ras el hanout (this depends on the strength of your spice mix)
2-3 pieces preserved lemon, thinly sliced*
olive oil

at the end
chopped parsley, mint, cilantro
salt to taste

*I'm lucky to have a jar of homemade preserved lemons on hand, but if you don't have any, you can either substitute a squeeze of lemon juice at the end, OR consider making the "quick preserved lemons" in Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookbook, which are ready in a day instead of the usual 4 weeks of fermentation.

If you don't have ras el hanout—which varies widely in flavor because it simply means "house spice blend"—you can use cinnamon, cumin, and turmeric to get the basic flavor across. Or you can get fancy and make your own.

Method
Place the tagine onto the heat diffuser and turn to medium heat. Fry the onions in olive oil for a few minutes. Add the garlic and eggplant and cook until eggplant starts to soften at the edges. Add spices and fry for a couple minutes more, then add remaining ingredients, including some of the chickpea cooking water to thicken the stew. You can either layer them or stir them together as I did (amateurishly). Salt to taste—careful, the preserved lemons are very salty already—and close up the tagine. Turn the heat on medium low or low, depending on the strength of your stovetop. Cook for anywhere from 2-4 hours.

My stovetop doesn't seem to work on "low" (eyeroll) so I had to turn up the heat to medium and simmer it harder than I normally would. And you're not supposed to take the lid off, like I do here. But it's torture not to take a little peek.

When the tagine is done, scatter it with herbs and serve with yogurt and/or goat cheese (both for me, please!).

For those who want to make the apricot couscous, I used this recipe, which was ok-ish. If I make it again, I'll use salt water instead of broth, since that savory flavor overshadowed the almonds and apricots.

I'm starving. What's for dinner?

Welcome to Eugene!

Hello world, I moved again. I now live in Eugene, Oregon. It is a city of eggplants.

First, I should mention that Eugene is... quirky. To say the least. Life here is quite normal for a while, then suddenly it becomes Portlandia without the satire. Every time something odd happens, people respond with a resounding, "Welcome to Eugene!" So the following is a list of statements I have uttered in the last few weeks, and for full effect, please welcome me to Eugene after each one:

• Tempeh again?!
• How long did you spend at the mouth of the Ganges?
• To avoid touching the teacher’s face I just drew a field of beards.
• She said her name came to her in a dream.
• [Google search] “chicken noises are they happy”
• Everyone got a headache from that unlabeled wine.
• The duplex is pretty nice but the landlady needs total silence for her tarot readings.
• You want to *run* up the butte?
• Ooh can I please have one of your scobies?
• Moss fail.

AND ABOVE ALL:

• So all this produce is local? 

Yes, friends, this is the land of agricultural cornucopia. Everyone gardens. The farmer's market is yuuuuuge. I have been cooking so many eggplants I haven't bothered to take photos of half of them.

I made a pretty solid Turkish eggplant salad out of these grilled pieces and I didn't even photograph it. So copious are the aubergines.

Tonight I roasted farmer's market eggplants, tomatoes, rutabagas, rosemary, garlic, shallots, peppers. All locally grown. My thought was, if it's a high-quality product, I should just let it be. So I roasted it with olive oil, rosemary, balsamic vinegar, and salt, and sprinkled goat cheese on top. The only creativity involved, if you could even call it that, is stuffing garlic pieces down into slits in the eggplant's surface, then loading tomatoes on top to keep it from burning. 

Burned garlic is the worst.

Normally I do something more interesting. But the veggies are so flavorful that there's no need.

Eugene, land of home gardens.

My first taste of the city, before I established myself enough to roast things, came in the form of two eggplant dishes in local restaurants. First a salty basil and fermented bean dish from Ta Ra Rin, a Thai place.

Salty, slightly sweet, slightly fishy, super spicy. 

But what really takes the cake is the Szechuan food at Kung Fu Bistro. This place is unreal. Their "fish-flavored" eggplant (fear not, no fish involved) tastes unlike any I've had before. It was sweet, salty, tangy, garlicky, gingery, chili-ey, also loaded with fermented beans, and somehow different from any eggplant I've had in Chinese joint. What the heck do they put in there?

Tastes even better than it looks, and it looks like heaven, so... 

I got a dose of those woodear mushrooms I was craving weeks ago. Wut.

New aubergines appear daily in my life now, so prepare for one of two eventualities:

1) a major revitalization of this blog

2) me stuffing my face all the time and too busy stuffing to take photos, whoops, sorreeee

Black garlic, mushrooms, umami for miles

Back in Honolulu after a trip to Germany and Austria. Normally I scour places I visit for aubergine inspiration, but this time I got lazy and quested for the best vegan gummies. (The answer: none of them. They're all basically just Swedish fish.)

Fortunately my trip wasn't eggplant-less: I satisfied my Szechuan craving at Da Jia Le in Berlin, where I became hypnotized by this fiery red eggplant hot-pot:

My favorite dish there, which I also ate during a visit to Berlin last year, is the tofu cilantro salad. It's a cold salad with thin strips of that dense, pressed, smoky tofu with a brown skin + garlicky red chili sauce + black vinegar + fresh cilantro. It's way sweeter, saltier, and oilier than anything I have the nerve to make at home, and it's addictive.

All of this resulted in a craving for chili oil, fresh woodear mushrooms (see hot pot pic above), and earthy spicy umami. But since I'm no pro at Szechuan cooking and don't have any of the right ingredients at home, I had to adapt.

When I got home, it seemed the perfect time for cooking. The recipe for procrasticooking follows:
1) get on a plane
2) travel for almost 30 hours without sleeping
3) crash in your bed and marvel at how much comfier it is than all the German and Austrian beds
4) despite utter exhaustion, find yourself unable to sleep because of the 12-hour time difference
5) spend the first day back home in a total funk of jetlag
6) go to the Japanese superstore and buy Japanese versions of Chinese ingredients
7) COOK STUFF to stay awake

Recipe: Jetlagged eggplant
or
Eggplant, shimeji mushrooms, and tofu with black garlic sauce
on the side: fresh wood ear mushroom and cucumber salad

Ingredients
3 Japanese or Chinese eggplants
1 container fresh shimeji mushrooms or other mushrooms of choice
1/2 block extra firm tofu
3-4 cloves black garlic [homemade by my mother; yes I'm spoiled]
soy sauce to taste
sesame oil
olive oil or other cooking oil of choice

That's it. The simplest recipe I've made for a while. Black garlic is flavorful, but it can be easily overpowered, so I experimented with using very few ingredients to let it shine. It works well with mushrooms and complements those earthy, dark flavors.

Method
Create the sludge. Black garlic can be pulverized in a little water with a fork. Take out whatever firm pieces are failing to dissolve and mash them with a knife into a paste, then mix together until it creates this:

Umami is often not pretty. It's sludgy, fermented, gaseous and brown.

Mix the sludge with soy sauce to taste, but careful not to overwhelm the garlic flavor. If it's too dense, like a paste, add a dash of water until it resembles a sauce.

Cut up the eggplants and shimeji mushrooms. Sauté the eggplants first in sesame oil and olive oil, giving them a strong head start (that is, almost fully cooked) before adding the mushrooms.

Remember: eggplants need lots of oil. Don't skimp.

While eggplants are cooking, marvel at how their little heads sport 1960s haircuts.

Add the sauce and let it soak into the veggies, with most of the liquid boiling off. Turn down the heat to give the eggplants time to cook fully.

Tear up the tofu like feta and mix it lightly, coating it with the sauce. Note: the tofu I buy is from a local producer and it has an exquisite flavor and texture, way better than major national brands. For this reason I like to treat it simply and bring out its natural flavor. But if you prefer, you can always fry or bake your tofu cubes first to give them a chewy skin, then add them to this dish.

DONE.

And now for the wood ear salad:

Ingredients
Fresh wood ear mushrooms (or: dried and reconstituted in boiling water)
1 cucumber, peeled and sliced [note: I like to remove the seeds but it's optional]
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 large hunk of ginger, minced

Sauce (all quantities to taste; and that, friends, is why this blog will never be read because I just can't bring myself to measure things):
soy sauce
black rice vinegar
chili oil, to taste depending on spice level
sesame oil
sugar

Method
Sauté the wood ear mushrooms in sesame oil OR boil them briefly and strain. Either method works; just cook the mushrooms. Note that they won't change much in appearance, except perhaps looking glossier. Stir up the sauce, coat everything, and marinate in the fridge. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

A bowl of brown things. That's what happens when you go mushroom crazy at Don Quijote.*

*Don Quijote: the Japanese superstore in Honolulu. Where else can you buy a rice cooker, Korean beauty products, unusual mushrooms, hula skirts, and poke all in the same day? (Answer: basically every grocery store in Honolulu.)

An Eggplant Passover: Vegan Eggplants and Kabocha Squash in Coconut Chipotle Sauce

This year I hosted a Passover Seder for the second time. For those who don't know a bagel from a blintz: Seder means "order," so this is a ritual dinner where you follow a series of blessings in a precise order and tell the Exodus story through symbolic foods. It's also an event that will use EVERY DISH YOU OWN so I have decided not to host one again until I live in a place with a dishwasher.

Every single dish.

Passover is notorious for its strict food rules—no breads, grains of any kind (except quinoa for some painfully arbitrary reason), corn, beans, lentils, rice, etc. It's also a terrible holiday for vegans and vegetarians, because once you take away all those foods, you're left with nothing but vegetables and matzah-cream-cheese sandwiches.

That's why I served this comfort-foody vegan dish at my Seder. I think it even counts as paleo, if you're into that sort of thing.

Eggplant and Kabocha Squash in Coconut Chipotle Sauce

Ingredients:
3-4 Japanese eggplants or 1 large Italian eggplant
1 kabocha squash
2 cans coconut milk
chipotles in adobo sauce (to taste, depending upon preferred spice level)
salt to taste
2 kaffir lime leaves, slivered finely
lime zest
lime juice (to squeeze in at the end)
cilantro, scallions

This recipe tastes even better with homemade chipotles in adobo sauce, which is easy to whip up, especially using an instant pot. Combine dried chipotles with tomato puree, sliced onions, garlic, water, sugar, vinegar, and salt; cook for a long time on low heat OR pressure cook for 25 minutes. I usually make mine with tons of sauce, so I can get that chipotle flavor without building too much heat.

Method:
Scoop out kabocha insides and cut off rough spots from the skin. (Note that you can eat the skin.) Slice kabocha and eggplants and layer in a pan however you'd like.

I tried to get all fancy with it and then realized it would just become a chaos once everything got dumped in there. So much for aesthetics.

Prepare the sauce: combine coconut milk, chipotle chopped fine, salt, lime zest, and lime leaves. Adjust spice and salt level to taste. Note that the fat in the coconut milk absorbs a lot of the capsaicin, so you can add more chipotle than you might think.

Easy as pie.

Pour sauce over the vegetables and make sure it coats everything.

Cover with tin foil and bake in a 350° oven for about 1 hour, or until sauce reduces and vegetables look soft. For the final 10 minutes, remove the foil and let the vegetables brown on top.

Squeeze lime juice over the top and sprinkle with cilantro and chopped scallions.

This is way more delicious than you are even imagining.

Chag sameach! Happy Passover! Or just make this any ol' time.

Note: I think this would make a good co-op slop. Just FYI.

Use it up!

Sometimes the most satisfying kitchen feelings come from using it all up. That last smidge of mayo in the jar, the last veggie burger in the freezer, the last olive staring like an eye. The weirdly divine feeling of scraping the end of the peanut butter and it all comes up as one chunk. Why on earth is this so satisfying? We just buy a new container and the cycle begins anew.

My dinner tonight was a super quick, corner-cutting, busy workday kind of dinner. But the best part was how I used up the last of so many things, and all thanks to Mother-In-Law's Gochujang sauce that makes everything taste divine.

Here's what I used up:

• an old floppy Japanese eggplant that was starting to get wrinkly [NO double entendres please, that emoji has been ruined forever and it saddens me]
• half of a bell pepper that looked good enough to eat, but only just
• some onion I found
• a hunk of ginger tough as nails
• a dark brown quarter of an avocado
• the last cup of rice which needs using FAST because here in the tropics we have weevils
• the last dash of soy sauce YAY I can recycle the bottle
• the last dash of rice vinegar YAY I can recycle the bottle
• the final dregs of the homemade kimchi I've had in my fridge for over a year, and yes, it tastes better than ever

Additional ingredients:

• olive oil, sesame oil
• sesame seeds
• scallions
• smoked gluten slabs that look exactly like roast chicken and it weirds me out
• some frozen vegetable dumplings I bought at the Korean store [*gasssp* PREPARED foods?? Food blog heresy. Keyword: worknight.]

Method

1. Cook veggies in oil. Add ginger.
2. Add gluten, dash of soy sauce, dash of vinegar, 1/8 jar of Mother-in-Law's gochujang sauce and some water (OR 1 tbsp of real gochujang, the concentrated stuff from the Korean store, whisked with water).
3. Let it cook down until sauce is the right consistency.
4. Put on top of rice with avocado pieces, dumplings, scallions, sesame seeds, and serve with the oldest kimchi you can find.

For those interested to know more about the gluten slabs: these are from the brand VeriSoy and it's simply called "smoked gluten." I bought them at a vegetarian restaurant in Honolulu called Water Drop (and yes, you should go, it's fab). The gluten has a chewy, layered texture with a thick smoked skin; the flavor is less appealing than the texture, since it's seasoned with soy sauce and sugar, making it weirdly sweet. I prefer my fake meats savory.

A parting gift for you: a single scallion flower.

Actually, no. This is your parting gift.