Steamed Eggplants with Chile Sauce (Hong You Qie Zi)

When work starts to get busy for me, it becomes a game to figure out exactly what produce we can buy from the farmers' market (or at the grocery store) that won't go bad before we have a chance to use it and is also fairly easy to throw together at the last minute.  Take these eggplants - we had them for over a week before we used them.  And that worked out fine.  Actually, a lot of the fall vegetables last for a fairly long time (although you can get into trouble with greens).  Part of the reason we end up eating so much cauliflower and squash in the fall/winter is because both items have a pretty good shelf life.  And with a job like mine - you need some shelf life from time to time.  I think I have finally figured out what works for us and what doesn't.  For the first year or two of work we ended up throwing away a lot of produce because we would buy it and then suddenly work would pick up.  And before we knew it, 1-2 weeks would have gone by with me eating every meal at my desk (and Alex eating peanut butter crackers at home) and we would then throw away everything in the refrigerator and start from scratch.  Things still crop up unexpectedly occasionally, but I like to think that we have learned to manage it better.

This eggplant dish was something of a last minute side dish.  It was cold and rainy out, so I wanted to make hot and sour soup (which had the added benefit of using up the rest of the leftover homemade chicken stock from the Chicken Pho (Pho Ga)).  And we had this eggplant just kind of hanging out in the fridge from our shopping trip to Chinatown so I decided to try to come up with an easy Chinese side using the eggplant.  Of course we turned to our two Fuchsia Dunlop cookbooks first and then we picked this recipe because it looked like the easiest one.  My favorite thing about the dish was the silky texture of the steamed eggplant.  And I really appreciated how easy it was.  This would be a really easy side dish to put together to round out a nice home-cooked Sichuan meal.  It's not the greatest eggplant we have ever made, but it really went perfectly with the hot and sour soup.  We ended up drizzling the dipping sauce over the eggplant (and adding some scallion greens for color and to add a bit of additional flavor).  The dipping sauce is nicely salty and spicy and the steamed eggplant just soaks it up like a sponge.  Our chili oil had peanuts in it and they provided a nice little textural contrast, but totally aren't necessary.

Recipe after the jump!

The Best Eggplant Dish Ever

I'm going to start off by saying that contrary to the title, we did not find this to be the best eggplant dish ever.  Of the various eggplant dishes we have made for the blog, I vastly preferred the Andhra Spiced Eggplant, the Indian Spiced Eggplant and the Eggplant Caponata.  We have also made a number of other recipes that included eggplant that I preferred to this dish, but I am only listing the recipes that really featured the eggplant.  With all of that said, this wasn't a bad dish.  It just didn't really do anything for me.  While we were cooking the eggplant I started to get worried that it was going to be really fishy because the dried shrimp gave off a thoroughly fishy aroma as the eggplant braised away.  I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't fishy but it just didn't do it for me.  The dish was lacking the balance of flavors that I usually find in this cookbook and really only tasted like moderately spicy eggplant mush.  Come to think of it, the dish looks exactly like it tastes.  Now maybe it was a problem of execution.  Perhaps if we had added the optional ground pork it would have really taken the dish to another level.  I didn't think the dish was really lacking a "meaty" element because eggplant itself is already pretty filling and rich.  But it would have added a little flavor and a different textural element at the very least.  We tried serving the dish with both naan and basmati rice - I preferred it with the naan but that's purely a matter of personal preference.

Recipe after the jump!

Chinese Braised Tofu and Eggplant with Ground Pork

It looks like we are making up for the lack of recent Chinese meals with a vengeance.  First there was the Fish-Fragrant Eggplant (Yu Xiang Qie Zi), then there was the Brussels Sprouts Fried Rice with Crispy Cauliflower (which isn't exactly traditional but I am including it since it is fried rice) and now this braised tofu dish.  I'm not even counting the Roast Corn with Spicy Miso Butter or the Asian-Marinated Flank Steak that we served it with, although those dishes were also Asian-inspired.  So I am thinking that I might move on from Chinese for a little while and try some other cuisines.  I am thinking about doing a few farmers' market-inspired meals at the beginning of the week (celery root and apple soup and warm mushroom salad anyone?) and then trying out a few recipes from the Indian subcontinent that I found in Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent.  There is a green tomato curry that I am particularly intrigued by.  And I just so happened to pick up 2 pounds of green tomatoes at the farmers' market this morning and curry leaves at Kalustyans this afternoon.  So we are good to go.  Stay tuned for that recipe.  But I think we should shift our focus from China to other continents (or subcontinents).  And then maybe we will return to China the following week.

This recipe was homey, warm and comforting - the type of dish that warms you from the inside out.  My Chinese grandmother never made tofu for me, but this dish screams Chinese grandmother to me.  It was absolutely perfect for a brisk fall day.  The original recipe on Steamy Kitchen called for a pound of ground pork (and we used an entire pound although I wanted to use half of the package - Alex said using half was more complicated than it was worth and dumped the whole shebang in there), but I thought that was way too much pork.  I would definitely recommend cutting it down to half a pound (although if you are into meat, then go for the full pound).  The original recipe also didn't use eggplant, but I loved the Japanese eggplant in there.  I might even up the amount of eggplant next time.  The eggplant soaks up so much flavor and has such a wonderful soft texture (without being mushy).  Alex said that what he remembers best about the eggplant was "bursts of flavor."  I just thought it was delicious.  If you are not an eggplant fan, then you can omit it but you might actually surprise yourself if you try it...

Recipe after the jump!

Fish-Fragrant Eggplants (Yu Xiang Qie Zi)

It occurred to me recently that we have been remiss lately by cooking too much American and European food to the exclusion of Asian food.  We have made a few Asian dishes that haven't made it to the blog, so the dearth of Asian food isn't quite as extreme as it appears.  But I can't think of the last Chinese dish we made at the apartment.  Actually, that's a lie.  We made stir-fry a few weeks ago.  And I think that was it.  So I am determined to consciously tweak our menu planning for the next few weeks to incorporate more Asian meals and flavors.  This eggplant is one of my favorite Sichuan dishes.  I love yu xiang qie zi.  It combines a lot of the pungent and spicy flavors from Sichuan province that I love.  And before I go any further, I should explain that Fish-Fragrant Eggplant doesn't actually contain any fish.  Fish-fragrant eggplant is called "fish-fragrant" because it uses the sauce and flavorings typically used for cooking fish.  As a side note, when I came back from China I thought the translation was "fish-taste eggplant" until my mother corrected me.  Oops.  So this isn't the best version of yu xiang qie zi that I have ever tasted, but it is a really nice version.  I told Alex it was a little salty for me, but he disagreed.  As always, Alex likes things a little saltier than I do.  Alex also chopped the eggplant the wrong way.  I tried to explain it to him over the phone that the eggplant should be cut in batons, but we ended up with half-moons of eggplant instead.  Another oops.  The batons tend to cook a little more evenly and get all melty and delicious.  But the think chunks of eggplant don't cook as evenly and some pieces weren't as tender as I would have liked - some of the skins verged on tough.  But I thought it was a pretty successful first attempt.  I have had many restaurant versions that were worse than our very first attempt at the dish so I really can't complain.

Recipe after the jump!

Grilled Ratatouille

 Are you ever surprised by a dish?  We thought this grilled ratatouille (which we served with Alex's Roast Chicken Breasts) would be good since we had wonderful produce, but neither of us expected to like it quite as much as we did because it was so very simple.  I don't know what the French traditionally serve with ratatouille, but this worked so brilliantly with the roast chicken breasts that I am not sure I would serve it with anything else.  It was easy to make and very tasty.  We have a ton of leftovers, but I am excited to try the ratatouille ladled over a bed of pasta or couscous or as a topping for some good crusty bread.  I wonder what else I should do with my leftover ratatouille?  Before summer wraps up I plan on making this at least once more.  This ratatouille might become my new go-to side dish for our roast chicken breasts.  The go-to side dish used to be a simple arugula salad, but so long as the fresh basil, tomatoes and zucchini remain available at the farmers' market, I am going to make ratatouille!

Recipe after the jump!

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce

First and foremost, I wanted to say how excited I was when we bought Yotam Ottolenghi's new-ish vegetarian cookbook, Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi.  All of the recipes in there looked so interesting and the pictures were so beautiful, but I kept picking it up and putting it down because we already have so many freaking cookbooks.  I just didn't want to buy another.  But I am really excited that I finally caved.  Second, my pictures of this dish look awful compared to the pictures in the cookbook.  Just look at the cover of Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi and you can't help but be impressed by how utterly gorgeous his food (and the pictures of his food) is.  And then you look at my picture.  And the eggplant kind of looks like a... well I'm not going to say it because it's not at all appetizing.  But my pictures are nowhere near as pretty.   

Since this recipe is the picture on the front cover of the book and therefore a large part of the reason that I bought the book, I thought it was a fitting first dish for us to make.  And if this dish is representative of the other recipes in the cookbook, I am infinitely glad that we did.  Of the two of us, I thought that I would be a bigger fan of this dish but it turned out that Alex was.  He said that love was too strong of a word, but he "enjoyed" the dish and described it as having an interesting blend of flavors - the buttermilk/yogurt sauce was kind of tangy and the pomegranate gave it a nice sweetness without the whole thing being too sweet.  I would agree with all of his comments, but add that the fresh thyme was a really nice herbal (slightly floral) addition.  The eggplant itself was almost creamy and with the pop of the pomegranate seeds you ended up with a nice textural contrast as well.  My one complaint is that some bites of the dish just weren't as well seasoned as others, but you run into that problem with most roasted vegetables.  I know we make that comment/criticism of a lot of roasted squash recipes.  The layer of eggplant at the top that really absorbed the evoo and buttermilk sauce was delicious.  The layer that you scraped off the bottom (even after the addition of more buttermilk sauce) was less so.  All things considered it was a really interesting dish.  It was not my favorite dish that we have ever made, but the recipe is definitely worth trying.

Recipe after the jump!

Andhra Spiced Eggplant and Andhra Scrambled Eggs

From time to time we fall into a rut.  I think everyone does, whether it's a food rut, an exercise rut, an occupation rut, etc.  There are certain ingredients we always have in the apartment and that we use with abandon because we are so comfortable with them.  But most of the ingredients in this meal did not fall into that category.  This meal was so different from anything else we have made in recent memory that I think it completely blew any rut we might have been in right out of the water.  I'm not sure exactly what drew me to these two recipes, except that I was thinking that I have been neglecting a bunch of my cookbooks recently.  While we use Hot Sour Salty Sweet quite often, we rarely use this cookbook, Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent.  Both books are by the same authors, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid and both are fantastic, but while Hot Sour Salty Sweet is right in our Asian wheelhouse, the recipes in Mangoes and Curry Leaves are not.  One problem with the recipes is that they often require a number of Indian, Nepalese or Sri Lankan ingredients that we don't have in the apartment.  I'm not even sure if or where I can find some of the ingredients.  Unfortunately that knocks out a lot of recipes.  Luckily I happened to have everything we needed (or I knew where to find it) for these two recipes.

I can't think of enough good things to say about the Andhra Spiced Eggplant, which both Alex and I were fairly blown away by.  The flavor combination is just so unique and wonderful.  I really thought that the eggplant would be spicy, but somehow all of the flavors really melded together to create a very nice savory dish with great depth of flavor.  The recipe recommends serving the eggplant as a dip for chapatis/pita or serving with white rice.  We happened to have some frozen parathas that we served with the eggplant dip and the buttery, flaky parathas worked really well but I'm sure that chapatis/pita would be an equally good combination.  I will definitely be serving this one again in the future.  As for the eggs, I thought they were nice too.  We both preferred the eggplant, but I was very happy with the eggs.  I don't generally like cooked tomatoes (I love them raw, but I don't like the mushy texture when you cook them), but they really worked in these eggs, which is something I never thought I would say.  Scrambled eggs and tomatoes are a very typical homestyle Chinese dish that they used to serve in China all the time that I avoided like the plague.  But it was good! 

Recipes after the jump!

Vietnamese Cabbage and Egg Stir-Fry

The most apt description I could come up for this dish was "surprisingly pleasant."  It is just so simple and it uses ingredients (like cabbage) that Alex and I don't typically find very exciting.  We made it because I think we need to reboot our digestive tracts with vegetables and healthy food.  So I decided to make this dish, even though it had the potential to be really boring.  There are so few ingredients and none of them sound like they should really have any wow factor.  However, it all works together brilliantly.  The cabbage is nice and sweet, with a little crunch to it.  And the egg somehow makes the whole dish feel and taste creamy, even though there is no cream or dairy whatsoever.  I really didn't think that one egg could have much of an effect on that amount of cabbage, but it really does.  Make sure you do what the recipe says and leave the egg a little custardy for the full effect.  Then you add the freshly ground black pepper for some spice and it's adds another level of flavor.  It is simple, but every element really works together to make for a nice meal served with some steamed rice.  It's not going to win any awards, but it really is good.

Recipe after the jump!

Lavash Pizza with Eggplant and Arugula

What do you do if you're home alone for the weekend and you have a little bit of a lot of different produce in the fridge to use up?  You come up with a variety of salads, sides, and lavash pizzas!  And you order sushi on Friday night when you just don't like cooking.  But as a trade off, you make a deal with yourself to cook/eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at home on Saturday.  This recipe started as a way to use up some eggplant, basil and cherry tomatoes.  While I was at Zabar's this morning it occurred to me that I could make a lavash pizza.  So I picked up some whole grain lavash (it's that resolution to eat healthy again), some smoked mozzarella and some more arugula.  And then I decided to go ahead and wing it for dinner.  In case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty into winging it.  Sometimes it works out well and sometimes it doesn't.  But I always have fun along the way.

This recipe worked out pretty well.  Lavash pizza is such a great alternative to making pizza at home.  This lavash pizza was basically a less labor intensive combination of two pizza recipes we have made in the past - Eggplant Pizza and White Pizza with Arugula (which wasn't my intention going into it, but was what resulted).  I didn't want to go to the effort to make a garlic oil (although that would have been absolutely delicious here) and I wanted to use up my cherry tomatoes rather than use a canned tomato sauce.  And I certainly didn't want to go to the trouble to roll out pizza dough.  In the future I would prob throw a little Parmigiano-Reggiano on top of the eggplant slices on the pizza for an additional level of its nutty, salty flavor.  And I would probably whip up some of the garlic oil, because it went so well on the eggplant last time.  Minced garlic and a drizzle of evoo works fine in a pinch, but it just can't compare.  Otherwise, I think it all worked out pretty well for a dish I cobbled together on a whim with the random produce in our apartment!  Speaking of random produce, I went to the farmers' market again today and picked up some more...  I really do have a problem.  So stay tuned.

Recipe after the jump!

Grilled Eggplant with Lebneh

Somehow we never cook Middle Eastern at home.  I don't know why.  Actually I guess I do know why - it's just not something that occurs to me when I am planning dinner.  I don't stock most of the ingredients and spices at home.  So I have to make a conscious decision and effort to make Middle Eastern food.  Generally it involves a shopping trip to Kalustyans and some degree of forethought.  Forethought isn't always my friend.  But I decided yesterday that we were going to make a vegetarian Middle Eastern meal - this eggplant dish and a spinach and pomegranate salad.  The meal evolved around this eggplant dish because we got three eggplants from our CSA last week and thus far had only managed to use one of them.  And I am trying to be extra good about using all of our CSA and farmers' market produce this summer.  I also needed to free up some space in our refrigerator, which is verging on crazy full right now.  So we picked up the few ingredients we were missing and we made ourselves some Middle Eastern food.  And this eggplant dish was the clear winner of our Middle Eastern experiment.  It was very easy to make.  And it was delicious.  I have never tried lebneh before but it was delicious, similar to Greek yogurt but not quite.  Both yogurts are tart and thick, but the tartness is a little different.  And I think it is even thicker than Greek yogurt.  But it was delicious on the eggplant.  The mint really was the perfect touch.  This recipe is definitely a keeper.  And it provided me with enough incentive to add more Middle Eastern recipes to our repertoire.  Just eggplant today, but who knows what we will be making tomorrow?

Recipe after the jump!

Pasta with Let-My-Eggplant-Go-Free Puree

So I was blog-stalking awhile ago (I think it was last summer, which is kind of amazing and depressing all at the same time) and found a whole bunch of interesting vegetarian recipes that I want to try.  First I saw the Vegetable Pie with Zucchini Crust on For the Love of Cooking.  Zucchini crust?  Sign me up!  I love zucchini.  Then I saw the Summertime Lasagna on Steamy Kitchen on TLC.  Fresh ricotta, basil and tomatoes in a pasta dish that doesn't need to bake for hours and heat up the apartment.  I'm sold.  Last, but certainly not least, I came across Francis Lam's Let-My-Eggplant-Go-Free! Spaghetti on The Wednesday Chef.  I have to admit that I clicked on it more out of rampant curiosity because of the strange name, rather than out of any desire to make it.  And then I read the recipe (plus Francis Lam's post on the Gourmet website) and realized that I do in fact want to make the recipe.  Granted, it took me an entire year to get around to actually doing that, but such is life.  I had some eggplants from my CSA so I remembered about this recipe and decided that we should make it.  Seeing as both Alex and I made it home for a late lunch today (hurray for holiday weekends because no one bothers to come into the office), it was a perfect dish for a late light lunch.  The eggplant sauce had a ton of flavor, which I enjoyed, but it wasn't as much of a "sauce" as I was expecting.  The spaghetti kind of soaked up all of the eggplant juju and it definitely needed the extra drizzle of evoo and a little pasta water to loosen it all back up.  All in all, I thought it was a really nice vegetarian lunch when served with a simple arugula salad.  Have we made better vegetarian pastas?  Yes.  Just last month we made a vegetarian Pasta with Sun Gold Tomatoes that was absolutely delicious.  But was this pasta totally worthwhile?  Absolutely.

Recipe after the jump!

Baked Eggplant "Fries"

When we were at the farmers' market looking for for some fun new ingredients last weekend I saw a few beautiful purple eggplants that I couldn't resist.  They were so pretty and purple - a beautiful glossy lavender.  I was really looking for Asian eggplant, rather than regular eggplant, but I just had to buy these guys.  And then when it came time to cook them I had no idea what to do with them.  I had a pasta recipe that called for eggplant, but we just had pasta for lunch on Sunday and then I ate the leftovers yesterday.  So we made eggplant fries.  And I found a recipe in Mario Batali's Spain: A Culinary Road Trip cookbook for Fried Eggplant.  It sounded pretty awesome.  But I didn't want to fry anything (I included the recipe anyway).  I love fried zucchini sticks, and we have had some success making baked zucchini sticks.  So we made some eggplant "fries."  For our first epic fail of the evening we whipped up a bunch of Italian-Style Breadcrumbs and then tried to coat the eggplant.  It just wasn't working.  So we looked up a recipe for baked eggplant and found one that used a Greek yogurt mixture to make the breadcrumbs stick to the eggplant.  It seemed like a great idea so we went ahead and stole it, changing the seasonings and ingredients so they better suited the flavors of our breadcrumbs.  Once we successfully breaded the eggplant fries we started trying to whip up a sauce.  Epic fail #2 of the evening - a homemade aioili.  I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, but it never emulsified and thickened.  I looked up some recipes that said you need to use room temperature egg yolks.  That was probably our first error.  Lord only knows what else we did wrong.  Epic fail #3 - I think we killed our mini-prep.  Oops.  So these eggplant fries were good.  They were interesting and a fun way to eat eggplant, but not a showstopper.  After our failure with the aioli we had to scrounge around for a sauce and we tried serving them with mayo (Alex's suggestion and it worked pretty well) and ketchup.  I think if we had the aioli it would have been really nice, but what can you do.

Recipes after the jump!

Green Beef Curry with Thai Aubergines (Eggplants)

As our last Southeast Asian meal before heading off to Colorado, I thought it would be a good idea to use up the remaining Thai ingredients - the Thai basil, Thai eggplants and kaffir lime leaves in particular.  The only recipe that I could find that used all of the ingredients, including the Thai eggplants, and didn't require yet another trip to the grocery store was this one.  So we made it.  I know it's a pretty lame reason for choosing a recipe, but sometimes I am lame.  I just can't help it.  And considering we will be leaving tomorrow for an entire week, I really didn't want to go out and buy more ingredients and more groceries.

I guess it is no surprise that this recipe was my least favorite of the six Vietnamese and Thai recipes that we have made over the course of the last week.  I thought that it was the least flavorful, which is kind of surprising considering the punch that our green curry paste packs.  I also thought that the beef got a little tough and didn't absorb much of the curry flavor.  Neither did the eggplant.  I wish that we had lightly salted the eggplant or something before tossing it into the curry.  If the eggplant had simmered in the curry for longer it would have absorbed more flavor.  And if we had used a different cut of beef it would probably have been more tender (and potentially also absorbed more flavor).  I thought that while the recipe was perfectly fine, it was no better than the curry you could find at any of a thousand Thai restaurants around the country.  We have certainly made better curries before and I hope that make even better curries in the future.  I just purchased Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent and I think that it has some Sri Lankan and Indian curries for us to try.  Seeing as the cookbook is by the same authors as Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia (a cookbook we love and have had some real success with), I have high hopes!  I also just bought Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas and More, so get ready for some more dumpling recipes after we return from Colorado! 

Recipe after the jump!

Indian Spiced Eggplant

For some time I have been trying to find some decent new eggplant recipes.  I really like eggplant, but I very rarely cook it.  And when I do cook eggplant, I almost always cook long, skinny Asian eggplants in various Asian or Asian-inspired recipes.  I find Asian eggplants to be less bitter/sweeter and more tender than the typical Western variety.  But I can't always find Asian eggplants at the local grocery store, so I have recently been experimenting with Holland eggplants and other eggplants.  I can't wait until the summer when I can go to the farmer's market and stock up on fairy eggplants and little green Thai eggplants for more experiments.

My one complaint about this eggplant was that it retained a rather soggy texture from braising it in the first place.  While we cooked off the braising liquid, we were afraid of burning the eggplant (because we have definitely burnt eggplant before), so we didn't char it up nearly enough.  As a warning, the liquid disappears between one second and the next and almost immediately the pan starts to look crusty and black.  So we wimped out.  Even if we had charred up the eggplant a little more, only one side of the eggplant would have had any texture to it.  I think it would have been better if we had charred the eggplant on the bottom and then flipped it over to just crisp the top up a bit.  If we had done those things, I think this dish would have been excellent.  The spice blend was really nice and gave the eggplant a really lovely flavor.  I know that it's not the prettiest looking dish, but it really is nice.  I might try the spice blend and/or braise for other vegetables and dishes - it was that good.  I just have to figure out how best to adapt the recipe...

Recipe after the jump!

Ad Hoc's Summer Vegetable Gratin

A vegetable gratin might just be the lamest sounding dish ever.  Usually gratins are used to drench veggies and starches in loads of cream and cheese so that unsuspecting kids will chow down.  Don't get me wrong - a well-made potato gratin can be delicious, if a little heavy.  And let's be honest, if it weren't for this recipe being created by Thomas Keller, I wouldn't have given it a second look.  But seeing as it is a Thomas Keller recipe and I just bought his Ad Hoc at Home cookbook, how could I fail to give it a try?  You will have to excuse me for being a little late to the party as it's now early October, and not summer.  But better late than never, especially seeing as the farmer's markets are still full of eggplant, thyme and tomatoes.

I think this was the first time that I have ever heard Alex get excited about a vegetarian recipe and well he should.  Like all Keller recipes, this one was very precise and required a number of individual steps and a long prep/cooking time.  I adapted the recipe a little to suit myself (although I didn't really do anything to simplify it), including alternating the veggies in layers around the gratin dish, rather than having individual rows of eggplant, then zucchini, then tomato and then squash.  I guess I took more of a Ratatouille approach with the alternating rounds of tomato, zucchini, eggplant and squash.  I figured that way you would or at least could get all of the vegetables layered together in a single bite.  And isn't that better than having one row of the gratin that is only tomato or only squash?  I thought so.  In the future I probably won't bother broiling the gratin at the end to brown the bread crumbs because our gas oven has a broiler that is permanently set to kill.  We barely put the gratin in there for 2 minutes 6-inches away from the heat source and it was verging on burnt.  Bad broiler.  Anyway, after about 70 minutes the vegetables were cooked perfectly - fork tender, but not so tender that they were falling apart.  The lemon thyme and Parmigiano-Reggiano gave the vegetables serious flavor, and the panko mixture gave the dish a wonderful texture.  The dish isn't exactly a quick and easy supper, but it is a lovely vegetarian meal that doesn't leave you wanting meat (or carbs), which I consider to be a huge success.

Recipe after the jump!

Eggplant Caponata and Salumi

While out running errands this afternoon, Alex and I decided to purchase a few varieties of salumi from Salumeria Rosi.  We tasted several varieties of sausages and prosciutto and picked out four to take home with us - spicy soppressata, sweet cacciatorino, 12-month aged prosciutto, and 24-month aged prosciutto.  If you live on the UWS, or really anywhere in NYC, Salumeria Rosi is worth a visit just for their salumi.  It is amazing.  If you have any interest in salumi at all and decide to eat at the restaurant (rather than taking some salumi to go) you need to order the Selezione de Salumiere so you can try as many varieties as possible.  Yum.

To accompany our salumi, Alex and I decided to make some caponata and rosemary focaccia.  I can't say that I have ever eaten or made caponata before, but there was some in the display case at Salumeria Rosi that looked good, plus I knew it would use up the eggplants hanging out in our vegetable drawer.  Done deal.  I briefly considered making some sort of heirloom tomato salad with the tomatoes I picked up at the farmer's market today to go with the salumi, but decided that the caponata just sounded better (regardless of the fact that I had never tasted it before, I had some vague idea of what went into it and how it should taste).  From the endless hours of Food Network I watched while studying in law school I knew that caponata is a Sicilian dish and should be both sweet and sour and would contain eggplant, tomatoes, and balsamic vinegar.  So I went home and turned to Mario Batali to tell me what to do to make caponata.  I knew that there had to be a recipe for caponata in at least one of the four Batali cookbooks we own.  Luckily, we found a recipe for caponata in Molto Italiano.  Even more luckily, we had everything we needed to make it without another trip to the grocery.  I also took a brief look at a few other recipes online, but decided to just stick with Mario and see how it turned out.

So never having had caponata before, this was everything I hoped it would be and more.  It was delicious.  Sweet and sour from the sugar, dried currants and balsamic (just like I expected) but also wonderfully spicy from the crushed red pepper flakes.  The recipe also called for cinnamon and unsweetened cocoa, which sounded super strange.  But the spices smelled amazing while the caponata was cooking and helped give the caponata serious flavor and complexity.  I forgot to add the pine nuts (which neither of us noticed until I went back to the recipe to add it to the blog), but I didn't miss them.  Although the pine nuts would have added some butteriness and some crunch to the caponata, it was still perfectly delicious without them.  Unfortunately, our focaccia wasn't quite as successful.  Alex called it the "focaccia pretzel" because it was dry and dense, and had more of a crust than any focaccia I have ever tried before.  It still tasted good, but it wasn't exactly a focaccia.  I don't think we let it rise long enough, and I also think that I should have added more evoo to the dough.  Don't get me wrong.  We still ate it.  And it was nice topped with the caponata, but it wasn't focaccia.  Oh well.  The salumi and the caponata more than made up for the wonky focaccia.

Recipe (and pictures of the salumi) after the jump!

Soba Noodles with Sesame Roasted Eggplant

So I have to apologize for a rather extended absence (for me) from the blog.  Work went from busy to absolute insanity and I haven't eaten dinner at home for over a week.  Yeah.  And it's not like I have been going out to dinner - I have been eating dinner at my desk.  Every night.  Seamless Web is my new best friend.  Last night I didn't actually eat dinner, but after working so many days around the clock all I wanted to do was have a glass (or two) of wine and then pass out.  So that is what I did.  But now that I finally got home at a reasonable hour this evening, we are cooking!  And after all of those nights eating random food at my desk, all I want is a meal that is on the lighter side with vegetables - lots and lots of vegetables.  And with the CSA and my week-long absence, all we really have in the fridge is vegetables, so it works out.

When I started thinking light and vegetarian, somehow I started thinking about tossing eggplant in sesame oil and shichimi togarashi, before roasting it and serving it on top of a cold soba noodle salad.  Then I started thinking that a cold noodle salad topped with hot eggplant sounded a little weird, so I decided to serve the eggplant on top of a warm soba noodle salad.  After a week of catered lunches and delivered dinners at my desk, this was such a lovely home-cooked meal.  It was everything I wanted it to be, although Alex was trying to figure out how to cook the eggplant differently.  Perhaps next time we will broil it to give it a little more char on the outside, and a nice smooth interior that just melts in your mouth.  I see what he means, but I liked the dish fine the way it was.  The flavors were really nice, and this was the perfect meal to (almost) end a long busy week with.

Recipe after the jump!

Eggplant Bruschetta

 
One of the problems with our CSA is that we often get one of each item, instead of several.  All of the recipes that I have earmarked for eggplants require several eggplants and at any given time I have only received one.  So I had to resort to new recipes.  This recipe was in my new favorite vegetarian-friendly cookbook, Molto Gusto: Easy American Cooking by Mario Batali and Mark Ladner.  We only had one eggplant, so I halved the recipe, which was easy enough to do.  While I'm not sure that this bruschetta was the most successful bruschetta that I have ever made, but it was quite tasty.  I never would have thought to make an eggplant dish with a combination of tomatoes, mint, and hot red pepper flakes, but it was delicious.  Unfortunately, the only bread we had was a levain sourdough boule, which wasn't quite the perfect match with the eggplant topping, but it was still quite tasty.

Recipe after the jump!

Eggplant Pizza

The inspiration for this pizza came from our local pizza place (Caesar's, not Little Caesars).  They have a cheese pizza topped with eggplant that I love.  It kind of reminds me of a much lighter eggplant parmigana in pizza form.  The eggplant from Caesar's is very lightly breaded, but I decided to skip that step.  Luckily we had an eggplant from the CSA sitting in our crisper drawer along with all of the baby arugula (also from the CSA) that we used for our White Pizza with Arugula.  I'm really trying to do my best to use up all of the CSA produce in our fridge, hence our two pizza pizza night.  Regular eggplant is something that I have never been a huge fan of (instead I tend to prefer the longer, skinner Asian eggplants), but I have recently discovered that it can also be delicious so I am determined to try it out more.  I have several recipes for eggplant that I have been wanting to try.  And now that eggplant is in season, I'm hoping that we get several more of them from the CSA in the weeks to come so I can try all of my new recipes out!

Anyway, this pizza was Alex's favorite from our recent pizza night.  I took a few shortcuts and used Mario Batali's canned Arrabiata Pasta Sauce.  It is one of our absolute favorite canned pasta sauces, with a nice fresh tomatoey flavor and just the right amount of heat.  I used some of the fresh local mozzarella that I picked up for the white pizza, along with the eggplant and some fresh basil (also from the CSA).  I brushed the eggplant with the garlic oil that I made for our white pizza and I think that was a great touch.  Then I topped the whole thing with parm-reg.  Yum.

Recipe after the jump!

Eggplant Slices with White Miso and Cold Sesame Udon

For a change of pace Alex and I decided to have a vegetarian meal this evening.  Since it was hot and muggy out, the first thing that came to mind was a cold soba noodle salad with snow peas, cucumbers, carrots and sesame oil.  Then I decided that I would make some eggplant to go with it.  And after our meal at Yakitori Totto a few weeks ago, the first thing that came to mind was glazing some eggplant with miso and then broiling it.  We had both tofu and eggplant prepared that way and it was delicious.  Paging through my new Madhur Jaffrey cookbook, World of the East Vegetarian Cooking, I found across her recipe for Eggplant Slices with White Miso and decided to modify it to suit us.

So when looking through the cabinets before making my meal I grabbed the udon on accident instead of the soba.  And then I decided why not try it with udon instead?  I've never had a cold udon noodle salad before, and I actually prefer the taste and texture of udon to soba.  So we gave it a shot.  And while the udon lacks the nuttiness of the soba, it makes a really nice change.  Udon has a wonderful meaty texture and picks up the flavors of the sesame oil, etc. better than soba does.  With the fresh sugar snap peas (which I bought instead of snow peas for another change), carrots, cucumber and scallions it was a perfect meal on such a humid late spring evening.  It also made a really nice accompaniment to the eggplant slices.  The miso paste is deeply savory, and gives the eggplant some great flavor.  I think I might tweak the recipe some next time and try it with either sweet miso or dark miso, rather than regular white miso.  I also might top it with some thinly sliced scallions for some freshness.  It's a great base, but I think it can use some slight tweaks.  So many options, so much time.

Recipe after the jump!