Summer of feasts: tortang talong, agrodolce, imam baldi

What is a blog when updated annually then neglected for months at a stretch? Is it a blog? Or is it a love-letter that attests to a faithful relationship with the queen of vegetables? I have now been writing (sporadically) about my love of eggplants for over a decade. Food bloggers come and go, their recipes cluttered with ads. Scroll for ten minutes to find the cook time of a soft boiled egg. Satisfy your ASMR as TikTok influencers chop and mash in a harried montage. 

No! That is no honest, everlasting love of eggplants. The Aubergenius shares her failures as well as her successes, her stews that turn to mush when tinkering with a new instant pot, her grainy and dimly lit photos, her terrible Indian food before she learned to make real Indian food. It's all here, buried in odd glitchy fonts in the archives of this ancient blog. A record of true love. 

Behold! The humble aubergine
Its violet hue with velvet sheen
A creature from the sea, its skin
Like seals or eels, a fleshy kin:
For like the sea, it sweats in salt
Exudes its oils to a fault
(Its oiliness is not a vice
When mushy innards sing with spice)
Its lobes of seeds like sturgeon roe
Its toothy fins, its gut below
A belly waiting to be slit
To let out steam, and scramble it
Until it looks like heaven's paste
For not a drop should go to waste.


This year marks a turning point for the Aubergenius. Last year I poured my little heart into a very heartfelt essay on community gardens. This year, my garden has yielded pounds upon pounds of the most delicious eggplants I've ever had. Texture: creamy, buttery, fatty even without fats, so thick and dense you can spread it like a brie. Flavor: sweet, earthy, assertively eggplanty, not remotely bitter nor sour. 

First harvest. Yes, that eggplant is half the size of a human head.

Traviata plant is several feet tall and falling over with fruit.

Folks, I am getting spoiled. My regular meals are so flavorful that I can never go back to floppy grocery fare.

Homemade pita with tapenade, pesto, and roasted heaven-on-earth.

Just a regular Tuesday.

For myself, I just roast and eat. But when cooking with friends, the eggplants get more special. I give you: THREE SUMMER EGGPLANT DISHES 

#1
Tortang Talong — Filipino eggplant omelet

with rice, Jufran (banana ketchup!), and mango salad

Ingredients
A few small eggplants
Enough scrambled egg for coating (2-3 eggs + a little salt)
A bowl of flour
Oil, salt, pepper

Method
Bake eggplants on high heat in the oven until soft and blackened. Peel off the skin, leaving the top on, and mash flat. Sprinkle salt and pepper on the eggplant. Dip in the flour and then the egg, then fry. You may wish to pour more egg on each side if the egg doesn't want to stick. Serve on rice with banana ketchup. 

Side salad: sliced mango, cucumber, sweet peppers, cilantro, dressing made from rice vinegar and sesame oil

#2
Imam baldi 

with tahdig, green beans, za'atar labneh... and other feasty foods

I've written about imam baldi before. If you have small, flavorful eggplants and your tomatoes are starting to ripen, I know of nothing that better showcases the quality of those ingredients. The key is a long, slow cook at a relatively low oven temp. 

Ingredients
Eggplants
Onion
Garlic
Tomatoes
Mild thin-skinned green peppers
Lots of olive oil
Salt, sugar to taste
Optional: parsley, pine nuts

Onion-tomato ratio should be around equal or perhaps just slightly more tomatoes. But the sauce can be pretty oniony.

Method
Salt eggplants, sweat 'em, wipe off the salt and sweat, coat in olive oil and roast face-up in 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Roast the peppers in the pan with the eggplants. While roasting, make a simple stovetop tomato sauce out of the other ingredients. Add salt and a pinch of sugar to taste. Pine nuts and parsley are optional. When the eggplants are soft, remove from the oven. Save the peppers in a separate bowl so they don't burn. Scramble around the middles of the eggplants with a fork and pile the tomato sauce on top. Put back and roast at a low temp, 350 at the highest, for a good long time until the tomato sauce that was once sloshing in the bottom of the pan has become a kind of jam. Top with roasted peppers.

guys guys LOOK HOW MANY I grew

For loyal readers: yes, Kaspar is elderly but still alive and kickin'

Hard to explain just how good these are but I think you can see the flavor radiating in waves

Eat with whatever you like. My menu mixed Turkish with Persian so it included my FIRST TAHDIG (!)—that is, Persian rice with a crunchy crust—and side dishes like green beans and labneh covered in za'atar. Friends brought homemade pita, salads, figs, crème brûlée... it was a meal to remember.

With dill, saffron, and black eyed peas

quintessential "no this is not a polished food blog" pic

#3 

Grilled eggplants with agrodolce sauce — Sicilian sweet 'n' sour

I didn't end up with good photos here because we were grilling after dark. Whether you grill, roast, or fry, you can coat your eggplants in agrodolce, a puckering strong sauce that's oniony, vinegary, with capers and raisins and pine nuts... it sounds weird until you try it. Please do.

I followed this recipe for the sauce. Turned out great.

Master griller Lydia

Some we grilled with oil, others we coated in flour, egg, and panko

a dark, oily nighttime pic taken just before agrodolce was smeared on all this, which serves no function but to affirm that eating happened

In closing: revel in your summer bounty, for when the winter months come, the eggplant grows bitter and pocked, and the summer bounty do not freezeth well, and naught but faint memories remain.

Rich, Red, and Roasty (or: how I stopped mucking around and started actually gardening and boy is it hard)

This is the longest I've gone without Aubergeniusing, for no particular reason except I'm ahem *trying to finish writing a book.* I wish I could say the book is about eggplants.

Two topics follow: 

1) Eggplants Roasted with Turkish Red Pepper Paste, hereafter abbreviated as RRR (Rich, Red, and Roasty). 

Crafty: grew the 'gines, threw the plate

2) Gardening. Because the eggplants pictured came from my garden and I'm a proud mama. This started as "I grew an eggplant!" and morphed, for better or worse, into a small essay about what we learn from community gardens.

This was my garden haul yesterday, and hopefully as a fellow Aubergenius your eye will be drawn to those eggplants on the bottom. You might notice some of them look like bright orange peppers. Those are a variety called Turkish orange and they are abundant, sweet, and retain that cool orange hue when cooked. 

Lately I've been playing around with Turkish red pepper paste, also called biber salçasi, which comes in a big round jar at any store that sells Middle Eastern products. Even though the one I bought says "hot," it's hardly spicy, which means you can use a lot of it. The result is a rich, sweet pepper flavor that will turn your oil dark red, especially when paired with tomato paste. I bought my first jar while following a recipe for a white bean stew in red sauce, and eventually I started coating things in it and roasting them. Among the best results was new potatoes coated in pepper paste, salt, pepper, oregano, and lemon zest in lots of olive oil, with a whole head of garlic and several onions in the middle of the tray. Part of my garden haul yesterday turned into this: green beans with a similar treatment, this time coated with a pinch of cumin seeds, pepper paste mixed with a little tomato paste and loosened with water, oregano and salt, then finished with white wine vinegar after cooking:

Credit due: this is loosely modeled on a Bon Appetit recipe that I couldn't read because of a paywall, and regardless they used Harissa while I think the Turkish stuff is tastier. It's milder so you can use more of it. Who wants a sprinkle of pepper flavor when you can have an explosion?

The eggplants were cooked likewise, albeit salted and sweated first. Here's the summary:

RRR Eggplants

Ingredients

as many eggplants as your garden allows, cut into 1/2 inch slices

Turkish red pepper paste

tomato paste

cumin seeds

white wine vinegar

olive oil

salt

garlic, either a couple cloves coarse chopped or a full head if you want extra

optional: oregano

Method

Salt the eggplants and let them sweat 15 minutes before wiping off all the salt. While eggplants are sweating, make the pepper sauce. How much pepper sauce you make depends on how much eggplant you have. You'll want an even, thin coating on there. Mix together pepper paste and tomato paste in a 2-1 ratio (that is, half as much tomato paste) along with some water to loosen it. Add chopped garlic to the sauce, OR consider roasting a whole garlic bulb with the top cut off and oil drizzled on top. Coat eggplants in a mix of pepper paste and plenty of olive oil, then sprinkle with salt and roast at 350°F, flipping once, until soft and nicely browned. Remove from oven and sprinkle with a little white wine vinegar. Eat wrapped up in a flatbread, on a salad, as a side dish, or just by itself. 

Tigergines

Coated and ready for the oven.

Soft, roasty, SUPER flavorful.

If you take anything away from this post, it's that a giant jar of pepper paste does indeed belong in your fridge.

Part of what's exciting about this: since the last time I aubergined, I've become a gardener. Now commenceth Part 2: 

Community Gardens: On Rooting Where You Are.

I got a community garden plot last year and tapped into my salt of the earth side (i.e., repressing the lilylivered soft-handed city slicker). Community gardens are great places to meet folks you'd never otherwise meet, learn about gardening from others' tips, and comfort yourself that everyone is getting the same damn fungus in their cuke roots and it's not your fault. What's not always easy about community gardens, I learned the hard way, is the soil. My first plot last year had clay soil as hard as cement and I had to rent a rototiller to break it up. Even the tiller struggled. It made grinding noises and burrowed into one spot like a badger, making me lift the whole thing to advance it with blades whirring at my ankles. While tilling inexpertly, I discovered that the soil was also packed full of giant river rocks and mysterious pieces of plastic trash. Fishing out the trash and the rocks and the grass rhizomes left a crick in my back that lasted for a week. (The rocks, while annoying at the time, later made a beautiful pathway.) And while dashing the soil and its poor earthworms into pieces, thinking I looked so hip and intense in my wifebeater, I got the worst sunburn of my life. The kind that inches you palpably closer to skin cancer. Live and learn.

That first year my garden was shockingly prolific. I ended up with a cucumber castle taller than myself with so many dozens of fruits on it that no amount of gifting could keep up. I had a wall of pole beans, a potato patch, *purple sweet potatoes* (they turned out heavenly!), buckets of tomatoes, peppers, beets, squashes both summer and winter, and on and on. The eggplants were the only plants that didn't produce much, just a few nibbles. They are finicky creatures. They crave heat, like all the nightshades, but their leaves are delicious to every pest and they end up like lace. When they do produce, the fruits are rarely substantial. You have to harvest them before, or shortly after, the skin turns matte. Otherwise they'll go bitter, which they might well do anyway, just out of spite. 

First garden, planted up and ready to junglify.

Last year's first finicky eggplant.

That first community garden was also an interesting experience that took me out of Eugene's university bubble. Right next to the garden is what's called a "Safe Spot," a tiny-house program for those getting back on their feet. On my first day in the garden I found a surprising sight across the fence: a parked school bus with a goat grazing beside it. (Yes, I did feed the goat yummy things through the fence.) Safe Spot is an amazing program; not everyone in Eugene is as lucky as its residents. Coincidentally this garden was also located down the street from Eugene's largest tent city under the highway. I drove past it every few days during the second Covid summer when the eviction moratorium expired. It was tragic to see the boundaries of the city swell, spilling over from the underpass into the surrounding neighborhood and eventually up to the garden itself. Even when we have tremendous empathy for the houseless, and advocate for housing reform, it can feel disorienting to find oneself in the midst of a tent city. Some of those camping in front of the garden left escalating refuse by the gate. One day, when I was picking tomatoes at dusk, a man walked into the garden with an odd gait that seemed under the influence of something; I realized with a jolt that he held two large kitchen knives, one in each hand. I left swiftly without making sudden movements. The next day I found that several structures had been pulled down. 

There in Eugene's roughest area I met wonderful fellow gardeners who made miracles out of that tough soil. A family from Hawai'i cultivated two or three huge plots in a row, building glorious flower beds and an arching squash support with a homemade wooden bench underneath. I learned so much about gardening every time I offered them some of my copious cukes. Down the way, an exchange student from Japan made the most elegant structures out of found branches, working with their contours to create a wall of tomato vines, squash supports, bean poles, all with a natural lilt. The back half of the garden belongs to Huerto de la Familia, a nonprofit that offers gardens and business creation training to Latino families. One family turned their whole plot into walls of corn and tomatillos. 

All of this led me to an interesting realization: community gardens are a way to root where you are. They teach you not only to put down literal roots but to fully encounter the place where you live. 

Last year I moved to a different neighborhood and switched over to a garden within biking distance. This one, too, puts me in contact with people I might never normally meet. The soil here has its own challenges: it is darker, richer, devoid of rocks, but prone to flooding that leaves the garden under inches of water for weeks in the spring. Here everyone builds up their gardens into mounds, fighting the elements together with shared strategies passed down to the newcomers. My garden is near the gate, and I'm convinced it's the best spot because every person who enters says hello. We introduce ourselves and talk about squash bugs or covert composting or a variety of leafy green that's doing well in winter. These are little friendships that live only in the garden, and for the most part I don't know anything about these people, which is a strange realization because we have a certain kind of bond. 

Welcome to your new garden! Here's 400 square feet of hard clay soil packed with grass rhizomes. If you jump up and down on this broadfork and fall backwards with your full body weight you might be able to till it 6 inches at a time. Have at it!

After tilling and before the rains: a mighty amount of work erased by spring flooding. 

After a second tilling, walkways put down, planted up, ready to go.

Got lotsa compliments on this diagonal arrangement. Rectangles are boring.

Back in June before the tomatoes became giant monsters with vines flailing all over the place. 

People tend to show garden pictures like this cornucopia in ways that conceal the sweat, the sunburn, the eternal fight against pests, the dirt under the nails. Behind every cornucopia is labor. It's a good thing to remember while we roam the grocery (commodity fetishism cough). That opens up a can of worms that is far outside the scope of an eggplant blog. 

Instagram ready. Sweat photoshopped out.

Eggplant Fesenjan and more from Meera Sodha

There is a special pleasure in cooking so much that you send your mealtime companions directly into a coma. 

None of the recipes I made tonight are mine, nor should they be: I made five Indian dishes and I'm white as a lily. So I defer to the experts.

Most of what you see on this table (homemade ceramics aside ahem) comes from one of my all-time favorite cookbooks, Fresh India by Meera Sodha. I have made about 1/4 of the book so far and everything, I mean everything, comes out fabulous. 

But yes, this is an eggplant blog. And eggplants you shall have. This is Sodha's "Eggplant Fesenjan" (p. 115), which is actually an adaptation of a Persian dish that was commonly served on the tables of 16th-century Mughal emperors. (Um, cool.)

The sauce on the bottom is made with pomegranate molasses and walnuts, among much else. Apart from being quite sweet (savory folks: consider using less honey than stated in the recipe), I was delighted with the punchy flavor and the ease of making it look gorgeous. Pomegranates are photogenic. 

A note to my fellow Jews: this will be an absolutely perfect dish for Passover. 

Here's what else I made.

On the bottom there is a butternut squash cafreal (Sodha, p. 67). This is a dish from Goa, a city on the western coast that was the headquarters of Portuguese India until it was annexed by Nehru in 1961. Sodha has adapted the traditional chicken cafreal, a dish that mixes Indian with Portuguese flavors; the sauce is not unlike a Portuguese mojo verde + ginger and coconut milk. It turned out so good that I melted into the chair a little at the first bite.

To the right, I made palak pakoda using this recipe. Flavors were spot on. My frying technique needs work.

Edging into the picture below, you'll see a good old fashioned aloo matar made in the Instant Pot. It's a quick weekday classic. And satisfying. Recipe hails from Meeta Arora at Piping Pot Curry.

And the flaming pink star of the show: beet raita (Sodha, p. 248). It's topped with a tarka (hot flavored oil) of popped mustard seeds and crispy curry leaves. 

If you take away anything from this post, it's that I can't recommend Sodha's book enough. But also, I will say, a menu like this used every inch of my kitchen, every pan, every baking tray, three cutting boards, and I had to hand wash the food processor three times, so: I wouldn't agree with Sodha's subtitle that these are "quick, easy" recipes "for every day." On normal days, when you're not celebrating winter break with zeal, just pick ONE recipe and eat it with rice and yogurt and lime pickle from a jar. 

We ate all of this and now we are strewn about like beached sea lions.

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.