Summer of Eggplant Part III, Revenge of Eggplant

When I started this blog it was not my intent to feature an eggplant recipe every year.  The story behind the name is a different one than that of an innate love of eggplant.  But it has become expected of me and I guess I can do my best to help a vegetable (fruit actually) out.  This particular vegetable seems to have some pretty bad PR, even worse than the other ones.  This year’s eggplant installment is sponsored by Georgia Tech.  

The other day Jim, the kids and I were dining in the student center at Tech prior to our son’s drama camp play.  Like any food court it had a UN worthy assortment of ‘ethnic’ foods.  I got grocery store style sushi, the kids got some sort of imitation Chinese food swimming in sugar and sodium and Jim, functioning fully out of character, went Middle Eastern.  Now, the gyro or Middle Eastern food wasn’t so out of character, it was the side of baba ganoush that was off.  Stuffed grape leaves would have been in character but not eggplant dip.  He met me at the check out line pleased with himself ‘Tabbouleh and baba ganoush!’  Big smile. Unfortunately it was a truly insipid baba ganoush and I didn’t see any tabbouleh.  It was the sort eggplant dish that encourages people to hate eggplant.  It had the texture of baby food and it was beige except for the flecks of, was it carrots?  

So when I came home to a clean and empty house, save for two very exhausted dogs, I took the opportunity to work on the blog (and do laundry).  I tried to think of items I wanted to blog about but I could not get that bad baba ganoush out of my head.  I knew I had an eggplant dip recipe somewhere and it needed a day out.

Eggplant Dip 

1-1 lb. eggplant

3 tablespoons basil

Juice of 1 lemon

2 teaspoons tahini

2 tablespoons harissa

2-3 garlic cloves, blanched or roasted

3 tablespoons olive oil, divided

salt

Slice the eggplant in to 1” slices, place in a colander and sprinkle liberally with salt and rest for about 20 minutes. Rinse or wipe off the salt and leave to dry on paper towels for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 375. Pat the eggplant dry again. Oil a baking sheet and brush the eggplant slices with half of the olive oil. Bake for about 30 minutes or until the slices are golden brown and the the interior is soft. Let eggplant cool. 

Place the eggplant and the remaining ingredients in a food processor and pulse until just combined.  Serve at room temperature with a bland cracker.  I prefer the olive oil variety.

Note:  I use this recipe for harissa, you can use store bought or whichever harissa recipe you prefer.  If you make it, it keeps for about a month in a tightly sealed container in the fridge.  It’s also really good on eggs.

You do not have to blanch or roast the garlic.  If you read this blog with any regularity, you know I cannot tolerate raw garlic, but if you can, by all means go ahead.  If blanching or roasting seems like too much effort there is the microwave.  I’ll deny I told you to do so, but about 8 seconds in the old micro should do it, or so I’ve heard.

A Little Philanthropy

A little known fact about me is that I went to school in Colorado for two years.  I don’t talk about it much.  And it’s not because it’s a big secret or I’m embarrassed by it.  I just didn’t have a very good time there and therefore I don’t have much to say on the subject.  I didn’t have a very good time in kindergarten and you won’t hear me talking about that place much either.  I will say it was a stunning location for a college, at the base of Pikes Peak, and the campus is lovely too.  I had fantastic teachers, people who inspired me and I got to go do and see things I had never, ever experienced on the East Coast.  The experience made me a better person.  However, I had nothing in common with the other students, which made me feel like an alien. Sort of like wearing someone else’s clothes for two years. 

I was living away from Baltimore for the very first time and suddenly aware that not everyone ate steamed crabs or Mary Sue easter eggs. How odd.  To compensate, I had a large can of Old Bay sent to me from home, which I dutifully carried with me to the dining hall everyday.  You also couldn’t find a bagel to save your life, except for the frozen ones, so I had those shipped in too.

Colorado is not known for its regional culinary delights, or perhaps I just can’t think of anything that screams Colorado.  Tex-Mex? Or is it Co-Mex? I met my first chimichanga in Colorado Springs at the gas station and we became fast friends. Maybe chicken fried steak?  The first time I saw a chicken fried steak was in the college cafeteria.  I didn’t understand why you would want to chicken fry a steak and why couldn’t you just call it fried steak or even steak fried steak?  Anyhow, the point was lost on me.  But I have since learned that Texas also lays claim to the invention of the chicken fried steak and may well have rights to that claim.  Someone recently pointed out to me that Rocky Mountain Oysters are uniquely Colorado. I never managed to have one of those.  If that was my regional delicacy I’m not so sure I would brag about it. 

Another great thing about the college, besides the view, was the ice cream.  It was served at every meal.  Yes, every meal.  The campus lore goes like this:  Old Lady Bemis (I believe of the toilet empire) graduated from the college in the 1800s when it was an all women’s college.  She gave the school a large gift and in return, they did what most colleges do; they named a building for her.  Her gift, however, came with a caveat:  ice cream must be served at every meal, even breakfast.  I thanked Old Lady Bemis everyday when I helped myself to those ice cream buckets.  When I finally transferred to another school I was sadly made aware that not every school serves ice cream everyday, in fact, you are lucky to get it once a month.  I checked the Colorado College website to see whether they were still serving ice cream at every meal but it was extremely unclear.  Kids, if you go to CC and you aren’t getting your daily ice cream allowance I’d take it to the top.

So for Old Lady Bemis and her generous gift, I give you grown up cherry ice cream.  I have tried numerous ice cream bases and Thomas Keller’s is hands down the best, and there’s a reason for that.  I have changed it slightly to use 8 egg yolks, because while 8 yolks is obscene the recommended number of 10 is pornographic.

Grown Up Cherry Ice Cream - Serves 6-8

2 cups milk 

2 cups cream

3/4 cup sugar

8 egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla

1.5 ounces Cointreau 

2 cups cherries - pitted and roughly chopped

1/2 teaspoon of orange zest

Combine the milk and the cream and 1/2 of the sugar and bring to a boil.  Meanwhile whisk together the egg yolks and the remaining sugar until thick.  Temper the eggs with 1/3 the hot milk mixture, whisking until combined.  Return the mixture to the milk mixture and continue to heat while stirring until it can coat the back of a wooden spoon, add in vanilla.  Remove from the heat and strain the mixture in to a bowl over an ice bath.  Let cool and store in the fridge for several hours or overnight.  Pit 2 cups of cherries and roughly chop them, reserving the residual juices.  When the custard is ready place it, the Cointreau, and the orange zest in an ice cream maker and process per the instructions.  Just prior to finishing, add in the cherries and any juices they produced when chopped, process until blended, place in a container and freeze.

Cocktail Surprise

I love cocktail food.  I really don’t think there is a better meal than a bite of this and a bite of that.  One of our favorite date nights is to go to the drive-in and have a one bite cocktail snack  picnic in the parking lot.  We bring meat, cheese, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, veggies, crackers, fruit, assorted dips and wine.  And in the shadow of the largest land fill in Atlanta we classy up that broken down parking lot. 

Now Christmas time is just the best for this type of ‘dining’.  With all the holiday parties I can actually make cocktail food a steady diet for almost a month.  I love it, I totally look forward to it.  Prior to each party I imagine what will be served.  I am secretly gunning for some monument to cheese, a mayonnaisy goop pretending to have sophistication, a seafood assortment (sushi, shrimp cocktail, stone crab claws, I’m not picky) and a surprise.  I do like to be surprised, the same old artichoke dip gets real old after week 1 of the holiday party circuit.  Creativity is important and certainly appreciated, because I am certainly going to rate the cocktail snacks after the party.

I’m alway planning cocktail themed party menus.  They don’t ever happen but dreaming up platters of one bite snacks and dips gives me no end of pleasure.  For instance, let’s just delve in to the archives of daydreaming here.  Chicken mole skewers, tuna croquetas, tortilla espanola (cut in to bit sized pieces) and a crudite with chimmichurri and creamy jalapeno sauces.  Or mini cornbread muffins, ham biscuits with Vidalia onion jam, pickled shrimp, peach/goat cheese/basil crostini and cole slaw spring rolls.  Dear God.  Cole slaw spring rolls?  

For reasons I won’t go in to 1.3 lbs. of ground turkey showed up in our fridge.  I’ve never cooked with ground turkey nor did I desire to, I just didn’t want to waste food.  In fact I’m firmly of the belief that we could all eat something tastier than turkey on Thanksgiving.  Don’t act so shocked.  People act like they are so excited about this bird and a day later bemoan it’s existence. Seems a little fickle.  Not only that, you spend at least 2 days worrying and working with this bird only to get what?  A slightly less than mediocre slice of meat that is more than likely dry?  Even on its best day wouldn’t you rather have a pork chop? I would.  Ground turkey really is tofu for people who are squeamish about tofu.  It’s always pinch hitting for ground pork and ground beef: turkey burgers, turkey meatloaf, turkey bolognese.  Who wants to eat that?  Why bother, just make it vegetarian. 

So back to the box of blandness boring the crap out of the other foods in my fridge.  I’m not sure where this came from, perhaps a Bridget Jones flashback, but I decided to make turkey curry meatballs.  I’ll say this, these are pretty darned good but I won’t be apologizing to this bird anytime soon like I did the chicken. 

Jim was out of town when I made them so I had a cocktail party of one; I ate them standing up in the kitchen with a glass of wine, or maybe two.  Now I’m going to have plan a party menu around my new cocktail snack. 

Curry Turkey Meatballs with Sriracha Mayo - Makes about 2 dozen meatballs

Meatballs

1 1/3 lbs. of ground turkey

2 1/2 teaspoons of curry powder (I use Penzey’s Singapore Seasoning)

1 large egg

3 tablespoons of panko

1” hunk of ginger, minced

1 green onion, sliced lengthwise and chopped

1 shallot, minced

Juice of 1/2 a lime

1/2 red jalapeno, minced

1 tablespoon parsley, chopped
Vegetable oil


Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a pan over a medium-low heat, add the shallot and ginger and saute for 2 minutes.  Add in the onion and the pepper and continue to cook for about 5 more minutes.  The purpose is to get everything soft but not crispy.  Remove from the heat.  Meanwhile mix together the egg, turkey, curry powder, panko and lime juice.  When the onions, pepper and ginger have cooled add them to the mixture and make 1" meat balls.  Wipe out the pan and add another 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil over a medium-high heat.  Working in batches (about 3 so you don't over crowd the pan) cook the meat balls until they are cooked through, about 7 minutes.

Sriracha Mayo (from Midge at food52.com)


1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons sriracha sauce


Combine all the ingredients and serve with the meatballs.

Notes:  The mayonnaise recipe is from Midge at food52.com.  She pairs it with her winning recipe for okonomiyaki, which are absolutely fabulous and a regular visitor to our dining table.  You can click here for her recipe.

Groupies

I am unclear how it made it almost 39 years without having a panisse.  They are a French french fry.  Our first encounter with them occurred earlier last summer. ‘What is it?‘ I asked Jim taking my second bite.  ‘I don’t know, what do you think?‘  ‘No clue.  But it’s delicious.’ ‘Mmmhmm.’  So, we asked the waiter.  Chick pea fries.  Had we simply read the menu or paid attention perhaps we would have known.  However, it was a revelation.  Chickpea fries.  A little research told me these were indigenous to Southern France and as common as waffles at The Waffle House.  How had we managed to live our lives without these?  

The restaurant that gave us these gems is the second for a local chef to whom we are devoted.  We were devoted to his first restaurant and thrilled to hear about a second.  I am not sure he knows about our devotion but I suspect, now, between these fries, the pork belly BLT with lardo mayo, the crab roll, some very special clams, seriously awesome oysters and a fried chicken that rivals Thomas Keller and the Colonel. He is starting to catch on because we show up at least once a week, sometimes twice for lunch.  Lunchtime is quiet and we stick out.  Well, Jim sticks out.  If you have never met my one and only he’s the 6’5” bald guy in the Buddy Holly by way of Brooklyn glasses.  Jim, by sheer cubic space, cannot be ignored, and I’m the much shorter person with him.  Dinner is busy with curious food trendsters and hungry neighbors, lunch has not been discovered.  While I appreciate having a cool secret, I don’t want the rest of this town to screw up my good thing, so here’s hoping more people show up for lunch and Jim and I melt into the background.  

The chef is turning out food with a nod, a French nod, or a New England nod, or a Spanish nod, or a Florida nod or whatever he feels like nodding. It’s just good food.  And nary a pimento cheese dip, deviled egg or red velvet anything on the menu. The fries had to be ours though.  They are made much like polenta.  Chickpea flour, plus water, heated and mixed together, placed in a pan to cool then sliced in to rectangles and fried in olive oil.  That’s it or so said Mark Bittman and David Leibovitz.  However, these tasted better than that ingredient list.  It’s not that easy in fact it has taken me a year to get this one right.

This is what I have come up with that gets close.  If you happen to live in Atlanta go to One Eared Stag in Inman Park for lunch and try Chef Phalen’s version.  Or try something more adventurous because there is a lot of fun stuff happening on that menu.  If you don’t live in Atlanta, well, then you have an excuse to try mine.  

Panisses - Serves 4

1 cup chickpea flour

1 cup veggie stock

1 cup water

1 teaspoon olive oil

1 tablespoon parsley, chopped

salt

Olive oil for frying

Put the stock and/or water and the teaspoon of olive oil in a pot and heat until shimmering, not boiling, whisk in the chickpea flour and the salt. Continue to whisk or stir while it cooks for about 5 minutes.  Add in the parsley and pour in to a greased small rectangular dish, mine is 5"x7".  Cool to room temperature and move to the fridge for at least 6 hours.  I usually do this step the day before I want to serve them.

Turn the molded dough out on to a paper towel and blot any condensation.  The top layer will be lumpy, slice it off and slice the remainder in to fries.  Heat about a 1/2” of oil in a wide pan.  Fry the fries for about 5 minutes until golden brown.  Sprinkle with sea salt.

Road Vittles

One summer in college I shared an apartment with my boyfriend and several of his friends.  Living with 3 college-aged men was not as challenging or disgusting (minus a very contained experiment in the bathroom I will not go in to) as one might anticipate.  For the most part they were all fairly neat, everyone paid their bills on time and all were oddly domestic.  Everyone took turns cooking dinner.  And the dinners were affairs.  We cooked dinner. It took several hours, it involved numerous courses. Thanks to my roommate Luke’s discovery, often we would crawl up a chute, out a window and enjoy those dinners on the roof of our 4-plex over-looking downtown North Bennington, Vermont, which if you have ever travelled to North B know consists of an intersection with a stop sign.  But it is quaint and it looks like Vermont.

Dinner became pretty multi-cultural affairs in that apartment; J.P. grew up in Belguim, Andy’s dad was from Greece, Luke’s parents were from Japan, and then there was me.  Luke, of course, made the most interesting dinners.  It wasn’t sushi and it certainly wasn’t on the menu at Bennihanna.  He made dishes his mother made which I’ll dare to call Japanese comfort food by way of the many other influences of Flushing, Queens, where he grew up.  Luke could cook.  And we became those people, the ones that buy the kitty litter sized bag of rice so large you cannot put it on a shelf; you must stack it in a corner like a piece of furniture.  Luke even took a trip to New York specifically to get the rice and a few other staples.  Oddly he seemed surprised that he missed these things.  I can’t speak for Luke but I know his relationship with his parents was strained at the time.  I suspect that by simply cooking, he was finding that perhaps they had more in common than he thought and actually missed them.  You could see it in his face and you could hear it when he described what we were going to eat.  He wasn’t just cooking dinner.

One weekend Andy, Luke and I decided to take a road trip to Burlington to visit Andy’s sister.  Prior to leaving Luke surprise packed us some snacks for the road.  We started our trip up Route 7.  I remember this trip well.  I drove; Andy entertained us with Bible tales from the perspective of a young man who would eventually get a PhD in folklore.  It was fascinating and Luke passed out snacks from the back seat; onigiri (or rice balls).  Luke’s were a little smaller than a tennis ball and they were fully covered in nori and perfectly shaped.  Luke explained that this is what his mother would pack for road trips; the insides are a surprise but were usually filled with fairly common ingredients, like tuna fish or vegetables with soy sauce.  I don’t think Andy or I had ever been so charmed by a snack.   We ate them all almost immediately, curious to find out what was in the center.

You can put whatever you like in the center and take them on your next road trip.

Avocado Onigiri - makes about 10

4 cups cooked sushi rice

1/2 of an avocado, sliced in to 1/2” pieces, run under cold water and patted dry

2 sheets of toasted nori, cut in to 1/2” strips

2 tablespoons Kewpie mayo

1/2 teaspoon grated ginger

sesame seeds

Stir the ginger into the mayonnaise. Prepare a wide bowl full of salted water, this is for your hands so the rice doesn’t stick to them.  Place a 12” x 12” piece of cling wrap in the center of a small bowl with it. Sprinkle in some sesame seeds. Grab a golf ball sized amount of rice, shape it in to a ball and flatten it and place it in the bowl.  Put two 1/2” avocado slices in the center and a small dot of the mayonnaise.  Grab a tablespoon amount of the rice and put it on top of the filling.  Pull up the sides of the cling wrap and shape the contents into a ball.  Remove.  Get your fingers wet in the water and drip a little on to the nori strip then make a belt around the rice ball with the nori.  Repeat.

Good Morning Indeed

It’s that time of the year, drink recipe time.  We just celebrated father’s day and that means Jim gets breakfast in bed with either champagne or Bloody Marys.  Jim went for the Bloody Mary this year.  Jim drinks his fair share of Bloody Marys.  He likes them when we are traveling for pleasure on AM flights, and often times will have one.  Jim drinks enough Bloody Marys in airports that really should write his own blog about airport Bloody Marys.  

I usually do not join him for a couple reasons.  First, booze + a plane ride = groggy and bloated.  Second, much like the maligned Caesar salad, there are a lot of bad, bad, bad Bloody Marys.  I have no idea why.  But a good one is like a revelation.  One day we were in San Francisco on our way home from wine country Jim requested a Bloody Mary.  We sat down at the bar of our favorite SFO restaurant next to the Delta gates and Jim ordered his AM departure cocktail.  When it arrived I had drink envy, which, quite frankly, happens a lot.  It wasn’t so much the drink as the garnish they put in it.  No wilty celery; it came piled up with pickled carrots, okra and green beans, a pack of olives and a cucumber spear or two.  I eyed his drink.  

“Are you gonna eat that salad?”  

“Yes.” 

“All of it?”

“Yes. Why don’t you get your own?”

“I don’t want my own I just want your drink salad.”

“Excuse me.” Jim said to the bartender.  “May we have another Bloody Mary?  Actually, make that two more.”  And so I got my drink salad with a side of  cocktail.  And it was an excellent Bloody Mary.  

Soon after I started working on my own Bloody Mary recipe.  There is no excuse for a crappy one.  I suspect the crappy ones involve really bad vodka and off brand tomato juice. For me a Bloody Mary tastes like tomatoes, slightly spicy and you can taste the vodka.  It has a personality, not banality.  

So this year for father’s day we had Bloody Marys and I even joined Jim and drank one, or two, too.

Bloody Marys - Makes 4

2 cups Spicy V8

2 teaspoons worcestershire 

1 1/2 teaspoons prepared horseradish

1 teaspoon Old Bay

1 teaspoon sriracha

juice of 1/2 a lemon

juice of 1/2 a lime

pepper - a turn or two

1 1/4 cups vodka

Garnish

Pickled vegetables and cucumber - the more the merrier

Whisk together the first 8 ingredients and chill overnight.  Add in the vodka and pour over ice.  Garnish and serve.

Notes:  Yes, that is a Trader Vic man in the glass, he’s on top of an olive, pickled okra and a cucumber.  I like using the thick ice cubes that are all the rage currently, so my drink does not get too watery.

Bittman Breakfast

Weekday breakfasts are an a la carte free for all around here, egg whites for me, toaster waffles or cereal for the kids and nothing for Jim.  But on the weekends we make BREAKFAST.  More often than not breakfast on the weekends usually involves grits and eggs.  Sometimes we have Jim’s special breakfast potatoes and sometimes polenta substitute teaches for the grits.  We aren’t French toast, waffle or pancake people, I won’t go into the details of what those particular breakfast foods do to the four of us but understand it’s a family wide affliction.  I have an acute aversion to doughnuts and other breakfast sweets and for some reason we reserve bagels and lox for special occasions.  So it’s basically the same thing over and over.  But I am always on the lookout for something new in the breakfast arena.

A couple years ago I went on a Minimalist bender watching almost every Mark Bittman video the New York Times had to offer.  The one recipe that stuck is his Jean-George fried rice.  I’ve changed it, of course, making it less Minimalist.  Mark serves it for lunch, I serve it for breakfast.  OK and while rice isn’t that much different than grits or polenta just humor me that this is my different breakfast meal.  It smells great, a good use of leftovers and it’s good for what may ail you from the night before.  

Garlic-Ginger Fried Rice - from Mark Bittman and Jean-Georges Vongerichten Serves 2-4

3 cups cooked jasmine rice (preferably 1 day old, this is 1 cup uncooked rice)

4 eggs

3-4 tablespoons chopped ginger

3-4 tablespoons chopped garlic

1 leek, sliced

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 teaspoons soy sauce

1 teaspoon sesame oil

2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped

1 teaspoon sesame seeds

sea salt

Sriracha sauce

1 tablespoon white vinegar

Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a heavy pan.  Fry the garlic and ginger until brown and crispy but not burned, this takes about 3 minutes.  With a slotted spoon remove the garlic and ginger from the pan and set aside.  Wipe out the pan and heat 1 tablespoon of oil and saute the leeks until tender, about 10 minutes.  When the leeks are tender add in the rice, soy sauce, sesame oil and salt, stir fry for about 5-7 more minutes. Fill a wide pan with about 2” of water and add the vinegar; bring to a simmer.  Crack the eggs in to small bowls or ramekins.  Tip the bowl with the egg slowly in to the simmering water so the water comes in to the bowl to take the egg out to sea like the tide.  Repeat with the other eggs. Using a slotted spoon, gently redirect the egg around itself in the water. Allow the water to return to a simmer and simmer 2-3 minutes.  Remove the eggs with a slotted spoon or pasta claw and drain on paper towels.   Fill bowls with the rice, top with the poached eggs and sprinkle with the fried garlic and ginger and the cilantro.  Serve with Sriracha.

You can watch the Mark make it here.