Summer in San Francisco doesn't come until very late August, at the earliest, when we're guaranteed to have the best fruit on earth filling our kitchen. And from now through the end of October it will be warm. Hot, even, if we get lucky.
This is another dinner made with vegetables I roasted earlier this week using Tamar Adler's method. On Friday I loaded the oven with a tray of eggplant and peppers, a tray of acorn squash, a glass baking dish of cherry tomatoes and another glass dish of zucchini. Most of it turned out pretty well.
The really special part of this is the yogurt sauce recipe that came in last week's newsletter. I tried out Tamar Adler's instructions for roasting cherry tomatoes, zucchini, turnips, eggplant and peppers last friday. They were pretty delicious just on their own or mixed into bulgar, but now we'll have them with sauce!
Ok, ok, I know. It's an eggplant. And bulgar. Those Brits and their crazy misspellings! There will be some mint in this dinner, too. I've recently fallen back in love with bulgar's nubby nuttiness and we have eggplant in the CSA box, again. On p.19 in Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries.
Pomegranate molasses is one of those strange ingredients sitting in my fridge that I very rarely use. How exciting that it will help me use another ingredient I very rarely use: eggplant. This is made with tempeh and the recipe calls for winter squash, but I'm going to see if I can sub in zucchini instead. Because it's still summer.
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.
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.
We came home late from school, again today. I started Sesame Street at 5:00, hoping to have dinner on the table by 6:00 and finished by 6:15, which seems easy enough, since the kids either gobble it down or don't eat at all. Today's scheduled recipe was eggplant curry, using 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 seems like an awful waste of time.