Eating Dirt

Tasty Mush from Garden Gems

If you know me at all you have probably heard that I do not like eggplant. These are strong words, because with adequate salt, I really honestly do enjoy almost all food. But  having nearly no taste of its own and the texture of either a stiff sponge or a gooey mess, depending on how it is cooked, eggplant does not win me over.

Eggplant in the garden, however, is a completely different story. I've seen them in Nigel Slater's and Stephane Alexander's books (see aubergine) and in seed catalogs - photos of gloriously glowing purple, pink and white gems, dangling out of a mass of verdant green. With lavender and white flowers that have tiny yellow centers, and a soft fuzz over much of the stem, they are really delightful. This summer I was excited to discover some in my mother's garden, thin opalescent tubes that somehow managed to beat the Tucson heat, hiding under their sheltering leaves and a bit of shade cloth. I wonder if either she or the javelina have eaten them yet.

So each summer, when our produce box is overflowing with these purple beauties, I seek out new recipes and try to love eggplant. I wish could justify planting them in my own garden, but in addition to not wanting to eat them, I suspect they would quickly suffer a cold and foggy death just like my tomatoes.

This year's big win has been baba ghanoush. The lebanese were onto something when they roasted their eggplants over an open flame - the smokey flavor goes a long way in a vegetable with none of its own. So while you can certainly roast yours in the oven, I prefer a charcoal grill. Not only does it taste better, but if you are lucky enough to have a spouse who likes to escape the house and hang out in the yard with a beer, you can probably share the load and pass the roasting on to him (or her). 

Serve it with pita chips at the school picnic, or plain old pitas for a more discerning crowd. You'll not only impress them with your cooking skills, but you'll get the eggplants out of the house. Enjoy!

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Baba Ghanoush - The Best In The World! (adapted from a recipe on Food.com )

Thanks to my husband Jason, who researched this recipe and has made several large batches of it for me.

1 large eggplant (double this recipe for a crowd)

1/4 cup tahini

3 garlic cloves, minced

1/4 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice, plus more if needed

1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon Pimentón (aka Spanish Paprika)

salt

1 Tablespoon olive oil

1 Tablespoon chopped fresh parsley 

Prepare your grill, you'll want it medium hot, whatever that means. Preheat the oven to 375° F. Poke the eggplant with a fork a few times so that it doesn't explode and place on the grill 5 inches or so above the fire. Grill, turning often, until the skin blackens and blisters and the flesh begins to feel soft, 10-15 minutes.

Put the eggplant on a baking sheet and into the oven. Bake 15-20 minutes until it is very soft. Remove it from the oven, let it cool so that you can peel off the skin and put the insides into a bowl. With a fork, mash the eggplant to a paste. Add the tahini, garlic, lemon juice, cumin and Pimentón, mix well. Season with salt, then add more lemon juice, tahini or salt until it tastes good. 

Transfer to a serving bowl, smooth the top and pat a small well in it, then drizzle the olive oil on top and sprinkle with parsley. Serve at room temperature.

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Ratatouille Wins One for Zucchinni, or Maybe Cucumber

  

As I've mentioned before, I don't love eggplant. But this is their season, so mixed with some good tomatoes, peppers, an onion and whatever zucchini you have cluttering up your counter (or fridge or garden), they're really not so bad. Especially when served over saffron rice. With lots of butter and salt. The rice is my favorite part of this dinner. Ratatouille is not hard to make, though its best done in stages, and can be made a day ahead and even served cold if you really don't want to cook. Which makes it especially well suited to the wacky weather we've been having around here. I can heat the house by cooking ratatouille when it is 55˚ outside, then serve it cold with a squeeze of lemon the next day when it is 95˚. 

My kids won't touch the eggplant, but they do love the rice. Of course eating rice in our house always makes for a huge cleanup, but I just try to serve the kids early, then make my husband fix the mess when he gets home. He's always good for that, with only moderate to severe grumbling. After dinner, their plates look about the same as before, but with rice strewn all over the floor and stuck to their clothing. Sometimes they eat the fruit, usually the sausage (if its Aidell's chicken apple) and always the bread (when there is bread). I force them to drink the milk under threat of whatever seems appropriate at the time and occasionally offer dessert for extra good behavior or three clean compartments and two bites of the fourth. 

 

Whoever came up with partition plates for kids should win a Nobel prize for promoting child health. Or better yet, a big statue on the Embarcadero, out in front of the Ferry Building. In addition to royalties from the sale of a new book, Feeding Kids for Dummies. Because that it what the plate does. Even at my most witless and sleep-deprived, I can still come up with a well balanced, unplanned meal at day's end. I simply fill one compartment with whatever my husband and I are having for dinner, then sort through the fridge to fill the rest - one vegetable, one protein, one grain, one fruit. Or whatever else is in there. The variety usually makes it healthy enough.

Similar to the partition plate, my kids' lunchboxes are those bento style boxes that have multiple little compartments. Since the beginning of this school year I have filled one compartment up with raw bits of different vegetables each day - carrots, cauliflower, radishes, snap peas. Sometimes red and yellow pepper, often broccoli, occasionally cucumber and on super special occasions, miniature purple carrots with orange insides. Sometimes I add a little container of dressing, most often a quickie vinaigrette (1/2 teaspoon champagne vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon mustard, 1 teaspoon olive oil, shake it up), or just a little container of salt, especially if radishes are included. 

About half of the veggies go uneaten, but even so, my daughter has been eating things I was certain she didn't like. Last week she ate some cucumber, for the first time ever, and she has tried pepper and snap peas too. Carrots are always a sure bet, with broccoli and radishes placing second and third in her hierarchy of vegetable love. The day she ate the cucumber was also Ratatouille day. After polishing off her berries, rice, sausage and then asking for another, I offered her two bites of ice cream if she would eat two bites of ratatouille. After great deliberation and with much fanfare, she selected a piece of zucchini as her first bite, and then another for her second. 

"I love it!" She announced. "I want this in my lunchbox...cucumber cooked just like this one, plain, with nothing on it. No tomatoes or eggplant or onions," she told me, disdainfully pushing the rejected vegetables around their tiny compartment. And now I plan to steam zucchini for her lunchbox. And call it cucumber. Because with a situation as tenuous and fickle as a Kindergartener eating vegetables, I can't afford to go wrong.

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Ratatouille (adapted from The Joy of Cooking):

1/4 cup olive oil

1 medium eggplant (about 1 pound) peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

1 pound zucchini, cut into 1-inch cubes

1 large onion, chopped

2 large red bell peppers, cut into 1-inch squares

3 cloves garlic, chopped

2 really big or 3 medium tomatoes, seeded and chopped (slice in half widthwise, then squeeze over the sink to seed)

3 or 4 sprigs fresh thyme

1 bay leaf

1/4 cup chopped basil (or 2 Tablespoons pesto if you don't have fresh basil)

Start by peeling and chopping the eggplant, then liberally cover it with salt and let it sit in a colander in the sink for twenty minutes or longer, if you need to. This step is especially important if your eggplant is on the older side, it will help remove the bitterness. While it sits in salt you can prep the rest of the veggies, and then rinse and dry the eggplant pieces before cooking them. If your eggplant is fresh off the plant, you can skip this step. 

When your eggplant has been salted long enough, rinse it off and pat it dry. Warm most of the olive oil (but not all, reserve two or three Tablespoons) in a skillet over medium high heat, then saute the eggplant and zucchini for about 10 minutes, until it is tender. Remove it from the pan. Add the remaining olive oil and the onions, garlic, and peppers. Saute those vegetables until the onions are translucent and the other veggies tender and fragrant. 

Add the tomatoes, thyme and bay leaf, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes, until the vegetables are as squishy as you want them to be. Taste and season with salt and pepper, and stir in the basil or pesto. 

To make saffron rice, add a large pinch of saffron threads to your rice cooker, then add butter and salt to taste after it is cooked. Serve it with the ratatouille, hot or cold with a squeeze of lemon.

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Quick Eggplant Chicken Curry and How to Cut an Onion

We came home late from school, again today. I started Sesame Street at 5:00, wanting the kids to be eating before 6:00, hopefully finished by 6:30, which is easy enough, since they either gobble dinner down or don't eat it at all. Today's scheduled recipe was eggplant curry with the leftover chicken from tuesday's paella. But, I hadn't salted the eggplant beforehand, and now twenty minutes of letting salty eggplant sit and drain into the sink seemed like a bad idea.

I have never understood the need for salting eggplant. In nearly every cookbook written before 2000, it says that one needs to salt eggplant and let it sit for twenty minutes, in order to get the bitterness out. But here's the thing - whether I salt and sit the eggplant or not, it doesn't taste bitter. Maybe the bitterness gene has been bred out of modern eggplant, or eggplant from our CSA is too fresh to be bitter, or perhaps I just don't have the capacity to taste the bitter in eggplant. 

Don't get me wrong - I don't love eggplant and have some special tolerance for bitterness. In fact, in years past, I've been perfectly happy to get only one or two from the CSA box per summer. That is really quite enough for me. But this year, we've had at least ten eggplant so far, and the season is just gearing up. Last week I roasted four of the ten, letting them collapse into a mushy brown paste, then mixed it with roasted garlic, salt, olive oil, and brought it to the preschool picnic. On crackers, the mush was very good. Even for someone who doesn't like eggplant.

Earlier in the week we ate something with chickpeas and tomatoes and basil and eggplant, from The Kitchen Diaries, but it was merely OK. Tonight I used one more for the curry, which was pretty tasty. Then four new ones arrived, glistening and globular, in today's produce box. What to do?

But back to the curry. It tasted good and was ready to eat in about 45 minutes, required no prep ahead or special ingredients. I served the kids' dinner up on a four partition plate: rice in the large section, three pieces of chicken extracted from the curry and half a banana on the two medium ones, a dollop of curried vegetables in the smallest space. Plus a cup of milk and their own access to the salt shaker, with my observation. All of it was eaten, except the veggies. My daughter ate one bite in exchange for a second helping of rice. To me, that's success.

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Quick Eggplant Chicken Curry (adapted from Camellia Panjabi's 50 Great Curries of India):

For the rice:

2-3 cups basmati rice, depending on how much your family will eat

1 cinnamon stick, broken into 2 pieces

3 whole cloves

2 cardamon pods

pinch saffron

2 Tablespoons butter

salt (if you use unsalted butter)

For the curry:

4 tablespoons canola oil (or some other mildly flavored variety)

1 onion, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves

1 half inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped (or 1 teaspoon powdered ginger, if thats what you have)

1 teaspoon ground coriander (or substitute 2 Tablespoons curry powder for this and the next 3 spices)

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1 eggplant

2 poblano peppers (or other mildly spicy variety)

1 or 2 zucchini or other summer squash

2 tomaotes

leftover raw chicken, white or dark meat (as much as you want, 1 chicken breast's worth is plenty)

cilantro to garnish

salt

First of all, start your rice. The easiest thing to do is use a rice cooker. Add as much rice as your family will eat, 2-3 cups or so, add the required amount of water for your cooker, and drop in the cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and saffron. Then turn it on. When the rice is finished, add the butter and a little salt (if the butter is unsalted). With a little sugar this could probably be dessert, but my kids love it with dinner. You can use plain old basmati if you'd rather.

Warm the oil in a really big pan. You can use a wok if you don't have one. When you cut the onion, follow the directions my good pal Chris taught me, after he spent a month learning to cook somewhere in Italy with his Mother: cut the onion in half horizontally. Slice a bit off the round end of each half, so you can get under the skin easily, then peel the papery skin off. For each half, lay it cut side down on your cutting board. Slice the onion, as thin as you want (thicker for chopped, thinner for finely chopped and minced) in one direction, holding it together as you go. Then turn the onion 90 degrees, and slice it again, the same thickness as before. Now, because of the layers of the onion, you are done. Pick it up and throw it into the pot of hot oil.

Give the onion a stir or two, set the heat to medium low, and let it cook while you prep the rest of the ingredients. Be careful not to let it burn, just let it get golden brown. If it gets that color before you are done prepping, just turn the heat off. 

Cut the eggplant into 1/2 inch or so pieces, put it in a colander in the sink and toss it with about 2 tablespoons of salt. Or don't, if you're not worried about the bitterness. Core and remove the membranes of the peppers, then chop them into 1/2 inch pieces. Chop the zucchini into 1/2 inch pieces. Chop the chicken into 1/2 inch pieces. Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally, then squeeze them over the sink to remove seeds and juice. You might need to squeeze them fairly hard, depending on ripeness, but don't squash the flesh. Then chop them into 1/2 inch pieces. Finely chop the garlic, then peel and finely chop the ginger. 

When the onions are golden brown, add the garlic, ginger, tomato, pepper, spices and a cup of water. Rinse the eggplant in the sink, shake the colander to get off the excess water and add it to the pan. Turn the heat to medium and let it simmer for a while, about 10 minutes or so. When the eggplant is soft, add the chicken and zucchini. If the pan is getting dry, add another cup of water or so and stir. Taste and add some salt. When the vegetables are as soft as you'd like them to be, and the flavors are as blended as you'd like them to be, it is done. Feel free to add more water and salt along the way. 

Serve over rice with chopped cilantro as a garnish.

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