Eggplants at Their Best: Baba Ganoush

I haven't ever gotten too excited over eggplant. Done right, they are heavenly, but there are so many ways to do them wrong. Under-cooked, they're weirdly spongy, and a bit bland. To me, they seem to require a little more finesse than other veggies, so admittedly I don't cook with them often. My eggplant love affair began after eating baba ganoush at an Israeli restaurant. I think, up until then, I imagined it was just a different type of hummus, au contraire! Baba ganoush is like hummus in that it also uses a tahini base, but instead of chick peas, the superstar is roasted eggplant. After reading the gist of the recipe, I thought, "that seems too easy"... To the kitchen!

I got this recipe from David Lebovitz, go ahead and read the entire post because he muses on dining in France, where baba ganoush is called caviar d’aubergines. Fancy.

Ready? You'll need:

3 medium-sized eggplants (perfect timing because eggplants are in season)
1/2 cup tahini (sesame paste)
1 1/4 teaspoons coarse salt
3 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice
3 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1/8 teaspoon chile powder (I also added a pinch of Hungarian paprika for more smokiness)

1 tablespoon olive oil
a half bunch picked flat-leaf parsley or cilantro leaves

Pre-heat the oven to 375°. After you've picked out your prize winning eggplants, poke them a few times with a fork. If you have a gas stove top, turn your burner on, and put those eggplants right on the burner, one a piece. If you don't have a gas burner, that's okay. Just pierce them and move on to the next step.

Rotate them to evenly char the skin for 5-10 minutes, based on how smokey you'd like them. Before making this I've never put any vegetables directly on my stove top, but it's a really helpful technique! Apparently you can skin red peppers easily this way too. Watch them, otherwise they could set off the smoke detector. The skin gets charred and papery. I used tongs to transfer them to a baking sheet.

Bake them for 20 - 30 minutes. A knife should easily slide in without resistance. I put the timer on for 20 and test them. 

Let them cool before halving them and scooping out the roasted goodness. The skin should peel right off, if not, they could probably use some more oven time.

Blend the innards with the rest of the ingredients. *Be careful when scooping out the tahini. The oil naturally separates and sits on the top, so it's best to try to mix it up a bit. Easy as baba ganoush! 

Serve with fresh pita, toasted bread, or if you're like me, and have giant bags of Stacy's pita chips hanging around, use them. David remarks on how this would actually be a little more flavorful if you made it a day or two in advance, making it excellent for entertaining. For that extra presentation panache, when you're ready to serve, put the spread in a bowl and using a spoon swirl a spiral in the top. Drizzle some olive oil over and let it nestle in the indentations. Top with finely chopped parsley.

*Kitchen casualty! While mixing the tahini a big glob of oil sloshed out. I didn't realize it also got to the floor... Later I noticed a big oil slick on Dante's head; looks like he was helping himself to it!

The Soup of the Summer: Gazpacho

So. Many. Tomatoes. Chris's mom tipped me off to growing San Marzano's, a type of plum tomato originally grown in the volcanic ashy soil around Mount Vesuvius. They are celebrated for their meaty quality, which makes for heavenly marinara. And I've made my fair share of marinara with these, but a hot bowl of pasta doesn't do it for me in these last days of July. Gazpacho. Now, that's the ticket.

Gazpacho turns a few people off from the words, "chilled soup". I feel like labeling it "soup" is just silly. Sure you can serve it in a bowl, and eat it with a spoon, but you can also just guzzle it straight out of the blender like Pepa, in that Pedro Almodovar film. It also makes for classy appetizer in tasting spoons or other small bowls. Gazpacho has origins all over Europe, but the most common is that it was a peasant dish from Spain. Making up fresh Gazpacho in the fields with a wooden dornillo would be a way to cool down, hydrate and energize. And it's fantastically delicious too.

I adapted my version from this recipe from a Slate article, You're doing it Wrong: Gazpacho. They'll also tell you all the wrong ways to do Gazpacho. But the most important ingredient should, and always will be, fresh ripe plum tomatoes.

You'll need:

2 pounds tomatoes, roughly chopped (about 10ish plum tomatoes)
1 medium red bell pepper, roughly chopped
½ medium cucumber, peeled and roughly chopped (always an English cucumber)
½ red onion, roughly chopped
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
⅓ cup almonds
One ½-inch slice white bread, torn into 1-inch pieces
3 tablespoons sherry vinegar
1 medium fresh jalapeño, seeded and roughly chopped (Or any pepper with some heat)
2 garlic cloves
Salt and black pepper
1 avocado, thinly sliced (for presentation)

Start with the tomatoes. You'll halve them and scoop out the gooey seed center. Plum tomatoes shine in this role, because they have much less seediness about them.

Many people will add water to thin out the final Gazpacho product, but why use water when you can use the fresh tomato juice? Set up a bowl and a strainer over top. As you scoop out the seeds put them into the strainer. When you've got all the tomato guts, use a spoon to smoosh the juice through the strainer. It won't add up to too much, but it will be enough to add to the final product for a thinner quality. That's the most laborious part.

 Add the tomatoes, olive oil, and vinegar into the blender. Give it a pulse or two to puree. Then add all the chopped and seeded veggies. Blend again, then add the almonds and the bread, which gives it it's thickness and texture.

Blend everything until it's nice and smooth. Garnish with some sliced avocado. Easy, so you don't need to slave away in the fields of Spain to enjoy it. Mmm.

Hey There, Jicama!

If you asked me what jicama is about a year ago I'd probably say it's some sort of illness. Quite the opposite! Jicama (pronounced hecama), mexican turnip, or yam bean is a tuber root of a plant in the bean family. It's crunchy and watery, kinda like a radish but a little sweeter like an apple. Have I confused you yet?

This is what it looks like whole. You may have already overlooked these bad boys because they look so... boring?

But I can assure you they are not! They are a super healthy snack, packed with vitamin C and B and tons of dietary fiber. It's used in soups, stews and salads, but my favorite way to eat it, so far, is as plain as it gets. Cut it up like you would a butternut squash or a potato, slicing edges of the tough skin off until you have nothing left but the white fleshy center. Cut that up into long french fry-like strips.

Liberally apply fresh lime juice and sea salt. This time I got fancier and added chopped cilantro and chili powder (but I think we prefer just the lime and salt). They are quite refreshing served cold. That's all there is to it!

Salsa Roja

Here's another salsa I prepped for this weekend. This a simple standard salsa made of pureed red tomatoes. You can use any sort of pepper you'd like for heat, but I prefer the smoky flavor of chipotle here. But the real secret to this, I think, is in the preparation of the tomatoes...

Start off with about a pound of Roma tomatoes, or another "sauce" variety. These will be a little sweeter and meatier than a big slicing tomato. We want to blanch them and remove their skins. Halve them, and notch out the rough stem part. In a large pan, put about an inch of water, and place the halved tomatoes skin side down. Start to boil the water. It doesn't take long, and you'll see the skin start to separate from the tomatoes. Turn off the heat and use a slotted spoon or tongs to remove them from the water.

The skins will easily peel off. But be careful, they're hot! I always burn myself on stuff, I chalk it up to impatience. As a little one, my Italian grandfather would always put up a hand tell me, "Aspetta!", which means "wait" or "hold on". Funnily enough, I didn't know that until my adult life. Anyways, don't burn yourself!

Add the peeled tomatoes to a blender along with one to two chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, add a little sauce too. Also add about a cupful of cilantro, and a heap of cumin. Blend it up!

Dice up a small sweet onion and two garlic bulbs. Get some oil hot in a pan and add the onions and garlic, but only saute for a minute. Then toss them into the blender with everything else. Pour the pureed goodness into a large pan and simmer on low heat for about 40 minutes. Give it a stir every so often. The salsa will reduce and the flavors will strengthen. Add a little salt and pepper to taste. This will yield about a mason jar's worth and then some. That means a bowl for now, and a jar for the fridge.

It is a bit of work, but I assure you it's definitely worth it! Now you can confidently pass by the bland Old El Paso jars in the supermarket.

Salsa Verde

After I learned to make these salsas I made them all the time in the summer. But since we've been getting our veggies from a CSA in the autumn and winter, we've only been eating seasonal and local, which is good, but I haven't purchased a tomato or a tomatillo in months. Tragic. I missed fresh salsa. Thank goodness for Cinco de Mayo! For our party I've made two salsas ahead of time, simple verde and roja. Here is a recipe for the "green" salsa.

Tomatillos might be hard to come by in the supermarket depending on where you are. But this is what they look like, little green papery lanterns.

The first step is to peel off the sticky leaves and twist off the stem that may be attached. Give them a rinse if some dirt is left behind. Discard the leaves or make something out of them, they sort of look like flowers!

Place the tomatillos in a pot of water, enough that they float. Don't crowd them, they need their space. Let the water start to boil. They should become a slightly darker green color and their skins should just start to split. Drain them in a colander and put them back into the pan.

While you wait for the tomatillos to boil. Roughly chop a small sweet onion, a large handful of cilantro and a deseeded jalapeño. I like things spicy, but to me, salsa verde should be more mild and tangy than leaving you with a spicy burn. So one jalapeño is perfect for me. Add everything into one pot, or a blender, and blend away! Get it to a smooth consistency. When it's blended taste it before adding the finishing ingredients. I use one lime, and about 2 teaspoons each of sugar and salt. Wait for it to cool a bit before you dig in, it will get slightly thicker as it cools.

Enjoy with chips or over tacos, enchiladas, burritos, anything!

Pickled Beets

We got the beets! We got the beets, we got the beets! Yeah! We got the beets!

If you didn't get my Go-Gos reference you should probably stop reading now.

With our first batch of CSA beets I roasted them, and transformed them into a tangy baconlicious salad. Now, with batch number 2, I’ve gone and pickled them. Yay for vinegar!

After I roasted them and peeled the magenta beauties, they got sliced and put into mason jars along with…

• wafer thin onions
• a rosemary branch
• tarragon

Heat water, vinegar, salt and sugar until everything is dissolved. Let it cool a bit then fill up the jars with the goods inside. When the jars are completely cool stick ‘em in the fridge. Be patient for 3-7 days, then consume. These are pickled, not preserved, so they don’t have an infinite shelf-life. Eat them within a month, or use your best mold detecting judgement.

Strawberry Basil Bruschetta

For Mother’s Day I was asked to bring an appetizer to our family gathering. I had just bought a delicious batch of strawberries that I wanted to use. So I found what looked like a tasty Strawberry Basil Bruschetta amongst the Whole Foods Recipes. So simple and fresh.

MIX:

• 1 Cup Strawberries diced (don't forget to dry them, if you washed them)
• A stack of fresh basil leaves chopped roughly 
• About a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil
• A drizzle of Balsamic vinegar
• Fresh ground pepper to taste

SPOON OVER TOP:

• Creamy goat cheese, I used a Trader Joe's Chevre
• Lightly toasted baguette sliced (Whole Foods used whole grain, I used regular)