Tag: Eggplant

Weekend Finds 7:20:14

July 20, 2014February 10, 2017

It has been HOT in Portland, you guys. I’m talking like 90 degrees, humid, blech. The kind of hot that just makes you want to dip your toes in a fountain, drink milkshakes, and take a nap in the afternoon with the fan blowing full force. When it’s this hot, it officially becomes salad season. Here are some weekend finds to help deal with the heat.

1. Gazpacho

Gazpacho Season // Weekend Finds on Serious Crust — Ooh I could go for a cup of gazpacho right about now.

Jonah claims he doesn’t like gazpacho, but I’m convinced I can change his mind if I find the perfect recipe. I haven’t committed to one yet, but I’m determined to make some this week, before it cools off too much. I’ve been looking at recipes like this, this, and this. Let me know in the comments if you have a great gazpacho recipe.

2. Tomato, Corn, Cucumber Salad

Corn, Tomato, Cucumber, and Feta Salad // Weekend Finds on Serious Crust — Doesn’t that look just like the definition of summer?

Earlier this week, we needed a quick, crunchy, cold dinner before we went to play a show. I picked up some corn, grape tomatoes, and feta on the way home, we sliced it all up, added some cucumber, and voila, dinner (via this recipe). Then last night we went over to a friend’s house for salad night and we pulled out the leftovers, threw them on top of some spinach, added some chickpeas and a tahini dressing (this one minus the ginger and garlic, plus a little more vinegar). It was filling and refreshing and really delicious.

3. Crispy Tofu with Sriracha Honey Lime Sauce

Crispy Tofu with Sriracha Honey Lime Sauce from I Am a Food Blog // Weekend Finds on Serious Crust — Beautiful tofu from I Am a Food Blog

On the nights it isn’t so hot, we cook things like this crispy tofu with sriracha lime honey sauce from I Am a Food Blog. I think this might be my new favorite way to make tofu. Be warned though, that sauce is spicy. (I like eating spicy things when it’s hot out – why not be hot on the inside and the outside?) Also, if you don’t know about I Am a Food Blog, you should. Go to her site and poke around. Everything we’ve made from her has been awesome.

4. Cleaning out your spice drawer

Cleaning out the Spice Drawer // Weekend Finds on Serious Crust — Look at how organized that spice drawer is. I want that in my life.

We are re-signing our lease, and that means we are doing a massive cleaning of our house. We’ve probably cleaned out our spice drawer(s) multiple times since living here, but it can’t hurt to do it again. It’s important to know how long you can keep things before they lose their punch. This guide from The Kitchn is a great help.

5. Miso Quinoa Pilaf with Eggplant and Cucumber!

Miso Quinoa Pilaf from Food52 // Weekend Finds on Serious Crust — Plus this quinoa pilaf features one of my favorite flavors ever: miso!

I don’t usually like quinoa. I find that it tends to be underseasoned/underdressed, and as a result is awfully bland. But my roommate is slowly changing my mind… We made dinner together a few weeks ago from some leftover, and we made this really delicious quinoa bowl with roasted vegetables. Anyway, point is, I’d like to try to eat more quinoa, and this miso quinoa pilaf looks like a great place to start.

Soba Noodles with Mango and Eggplant

March 9, 2013February 5, 2017

Jonah slices and dices all the colorful ingredients for the soba noodles.

It feels very weird to spread a pile of noodles on a dish towel to dry... But I'll do pretty much anything Ottolenghi tell me to.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Jonah and I made dinner for my mom and her boyfriend back in December. Now I believe I have told you of my love for Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbook “Plenty,” yes? This meal was no exception. The meal was all vegetarian, and 2/3 dishes were from that cookbook. The meal was light, refreshing, and packed with flavor. Not to mention the great company.

I fear that I am reaching a point where I cannot keep posting variations of these recipes, I just need to tell you to please, please, please go buy this cookbook. Even if vegetarian food isn’t your thing, even if the photos don’t make your stomach growl, even if the lists of ingredients leave you with questions swirling around in your hear. I beg you. Just go buy it. And then, please proceed to make everything in it, even if it doesn’t jump off the page. Every single dish I have made from this book (as well as his other book, “Jerusalem”) has been so lovely and flavorful that I wish I had tripled them all so I could enjoy the leftovers or share with a bunch of my friends.

Back to the dinner. These room temperature soba noodles are one of the few recipes in the book that did jump off the page for me. But somehow, I still hadn’t made it. While it’s a little prep-heavy, trust me, it’s worth it. Packing a lot of flavor and lots of little bites with different tastes (onion, eggplant, peppers, mango, the list goes on…), this recipe is bound to be a crowd pleaser. I can see it being especially good for kids. What kids don’t love noodles and mango? That’s what I thought: none.

Soba Noodles with Mango and Eggplant

Ingredients

1/2 cup rice vinegar
3 Tbl sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 crushed garlic cloves
1/2 of a red chile, finely chopped
1 tsp sesame oil
zest and juice of a lime
1 cup sunflower oil (we used canola)
2 eggplants, cut into ~1 inch cubes
a bag of soba noodles
1 large ripe mango (let’s be honest, more than one probably couldn’t hurt…), cut into ~3/4 inch cubes or thin strips
1 2/3 cups fresh basil leaves, roughly chopped
2 cups cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
1/2 red onion, thinly sliced (think paper thin, if you can)

Instructions

In small pot, warm the vinegar, sugar, and salt until the sugar just dissolves. Remove from heat, then add the garlic, chile, and sesame oil, and, once it’s cool, the lime zest and juice.

In a large saute pan, heat the oil and fry up the eggplant. You’ll probably need to do this in a few batches. But you want the eggplant to be nice and golden brown. After all the eggplant is cooked, put it in a colander in the sink, sprinkle (“liberally”) with salt, and leave to drain.

While cooking the eggplant, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the soba noodles in the boiling water – you want them to be soft, but still a little al dente. Drain the noodles and rinse them under cold water to stop them cooking. Spread them on a dish towel to dry.

Now the fun part: throw the noodles, dressing, mango, eggplant, onion, and half the basil and cilantro in a bowl and toss to coat/combine everything. You can make this a couple hours ahead of serving, and stop here, letting it sit to absorb flavors and come to room temperature. When you’re ready to serve it, add the rest of the herbs. Enjoy!

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce

February 24, 2012February 2, 2017

The posting of the recipe is long overdue, as I made this dish quite a while ago. So I may not remember the exact details of everything I did to make this – but here goes. Have I told you about the unprecedented influx of cookbooks in Annie and I’s apartment? I went from owning exactly zero cookbooks before Christmas and my birthday this year (Jan 6) to having 4. That’s a 400% increase in cookbooks within the span of a month! Anyway, Annie’s mom got me this great cookbook called Plenty, that has some fantastically new and different recipes. This is one of them.

A picture of this eggplant with buttermilk sauce recipe is on the cover of the Plenty cookbook, so I decided to make it. It looked like nothing I had ever tasted before, and that’s what it ended up tasting like!

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce

Ingredients

2 eggplants
1/2 cup olive oil
4-6 thyme sprigs
salt and pepper
1 pomegranate (this is the fun part)
For the sauce:
9 Tbs buttermilk
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
1.5 Tbs olive oil
1 small garlic clove, finely chopped
pinch of salt

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut the eggplants in half lengthwise (see photo below). Now cut some lengthwise incisions on each half, but not all the way through to the skin. This is just to let the oil and juices get around. Make some more diagonal incisions (I sort of did this like you would cut an avocado before you scoop the flesh out).

Place the eggplant halves on a baking sheet, and brush them with the 1/2 cup olive oil until it’s all used up. Sprinkle with some thyme leaves and salt and pepper. Roast for 45 minutes, when the eggplant flesh should be soft and browned.

While the eggplant is roasting away, let’s do something fun. To get all the seeds out without digging through the fruit like a raccoon, start by cutting the pomegranate in half. Hold one half over a bowl with the flesh side facing down into your hand (watch out, your fingers are about to get juicy). Use the back of a wooden spoon and start whacking the back of the pomegranate gently, and then with increased force, until the seeds start to fall out into the bowl. Don’t lose faith if seeds don’t start raining down right away: it takes a minute for them to start getting loose. It helps to flip the pomegranate half over once in a while to gently pull the membranes apart and pick them out. Do the same thing with the other half.

Make the sauce by whisking all of the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl. I used Greek yogurt that was honey-flavored, which may have been a mistake.

When the eggplant halves are done, serve by spooning plenty of the sauce over the halves. Sprinkle your expertly-harvested pomegranate seeds on top and garnish with some more thyme and drizzle with a bit of olive oil.

The taste was amazing – a combination of things I have never tasted in combination before!

Polenta Torta with Eggplant Sauce

February 9, 2012February 2, 2017

Last weekend, our friends (and newlyweds) Sophie and Johnny were in town. Sophie and Jonah were housemates senior year of college, along with the lovely Maureen (Mo). So we invited the three of them (Mo, Sophie, and Johnny) over for dinner for a little reunion. Mo is a vegetarian, so I immediately went to “Plenty,” that vegetarian cookbook that we are quickly falling in love with. I found a recipe for some eggplant sauce, to be served on top of sweet corn polenta. Alas, it is not corn season, so I decided to use the eggplant sauce to make a polenta torta (recipe found in Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food”). It was a really simple dish, and while we didn’t execute it to the best of our abilities (our dish was too big which made the layering hard) it was still very good. The mozzarella brought a nice pop to the dish, and was really stringy which I love. The eggplant sauce, as I said above, was nice and creamy. It was kind of like a layered pizza, except no crust, just polenta.

Polenta Torta with Eggplant Sauce

Ingredients

Eggplant Sauce

2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 medium eggplant, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
2 tsp tomato paste
1/4 cup white wine
1 cup chopped peeled tomatoes (we used canned, and I ended up using the whole can just to yield a little more sauce)
6 1/2 Tbl water
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar
1 Tbl chopped oregano

Polenta

4 cups water
1 cup corn grits (polenta)
1 tsp salt
3 Tbl olive oil
1/2 cup parmesan cheese (freshly grated)

Polenta Torta

4 cups polenta (hopefully the above recipe yields 4 cups… we didn’t end up measuring)
2 cups tomato sauce (or in this case, Eggplant sauce)
1 cup parmesan cheese (freshly grated)
1/2 pound (2 medium balls) fresh mozzarella

Instructions

Eggplant Sauce

Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add the eggplant. Cook the eggplant on medium heat for ~15 minutes, or until it’s soft and nicely brown. When the eggplant is cooked, drain as much oil from the pan and discard it. Now add the tomato paste and stir it into the eggplant. Cook for about 2 minutes, then add the wine and cook for another minute or so. Now add everything else (tomatoes, water, salt, sugar, and oregano) and cook for another 5-10 minutes to let the flavors deepen. You probably want to keep the pot covered so the sauce doesn’t cook down too much. On the other hand, if it’s looking a little too liquid for your liking, cook it uncovered so it can cook down a little bit. At this point, you can set this aside until you are ready to use the sauce. I made this sauce the morning of the meal, and actually left it on the stove, covered, for many hours.

The great thing about this sauce is the creaminess that the eggplant brings to it. When eggplant has been cooked this long, it kind of falls apart, and I love it when that happens.

Polenta

Now, I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t cook the polenta. Jonah did while I was getting in my workout at the bouldering gym. So I’ll relay what he did to you, but I don’t have any insider tips because I wasn’t there. But here’s what he did: Boil the 4 cups of water in a saucepan. When it’s boiling, whisk in the corn grits and the salt. Now, turn down the heat and whisk until the polenta is suspended in the water and no longer sitting on the bottom of the pan. Cook for 30 minutes – 1 hour (the longer the better, according to Alice Waters), stirring occasionally. Don’t let the polenta get above a low simmer. If at any point the polenta seems to be getting too dry, add a little water. Once the polenta is all cooked, add the olive oil and parmesan cheese.

Polenta Torta

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Oil a baking dish (like I said, ours was too big, so keep this in mind when picking what dish to use), and spread 1 1/3 cups of polenta out over the bottom of the dish. Over the polenta, spread half of the eggplant tomato sauce, then half the mozzarella cheese, and sprinkle half the parmesan cheese. Repeat: spread 1 1/3 cups polenta, the other half of the sauce, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese over the dish. End with a layer of the polenta. Because our dish was too big, we only did one layer, which was ok, but it didn’t look as nice as it could/would have if we’d done it right.

Once it’s all layered up, you can put it in the oven for 30 minutes, or until it’s hot and bubbling. Allow to cool for a bit before serving and eating. Enjoy!