Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Aubergines
Yesterday’s discussion made me realize how little I know about eggplant. No, I hadn’t ever heard of Imam Bayildi. (This looks like a good recipe. And with pictures, too!) My whole eggplant world consisted of eggplant parmesan, baba ghanouj, grilled eggplant for grilled vegetable salad, eggplant and shitake mushrooms (a Chinese dish), and stuffed pickled eggplant.
Mmmm. Stuffed pickled eggplant.
I love eggplant. I should be less eggplant-ignorant. Did you know they’re in the nightshade family, related to potatoes and tomatoes? Here, let’s learn more history:
- Eggplant were first cultivated 4000 years ago in India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia
- Eggplant cuisine spread to China by 500 BCE
- By the 4th Century, the Moors had introduced eggplant to Spain
- But even in the 16th Century, Northern Europeans thought they caused insanity
- The Spanish introduced aubergines to Brazil in 1650 . . .
- And Thomas Jefferson introduced them to the US in 1806.
In tonight’s quest to find new and interesting eggplant recipes, I found this old post from The Domestic Goddess:
On with The Paper Chef! Whose cuisine will reign supreme this month? We’ll have to wait to find that out, but not to find out who is competing in this round. Who has the guts? Who has the glory? Who has the gall to combine eggplant, chocolate, stale bread and pomegranate into one dish?!? Read on…if you dare.
Um . . . okay. I dare.
Samer’s bread pudding with eggplant and a chocolate-pomegranate sauce gets my prize for a recipe which looks good and, I imagine, tastes good, too. But Lyn at Lex Culinaria has to win the Biggest Balls prize for her
… Chocolate Eggplant “Parmigiana” topped with warm buttered crab and a bitter chocolate-pomegranate syrup….
Crab. Crab. Take an outlandish ingredients list and add a crustacean to it — go, Lyn!
I checked Domestic Goddess’s blog and, sadly, it looks like the Goddess hasn’t hosted a Paper Chef competition since March, 2005. Damn shame — I could really get into a contest like that. (If I hosted something like that, would any of you take me up on it? How much of a bribe would you need?) But let’s eat more eggplant.
Naw, on second thought, I’m kicking this one back to you. What are your favorite eggplant recipes? And if you say “Imam Bayildi,” give me a link to a recipe which looks like the real deal.
You see, blogs are like a memory stick. Everything I want to remember, everything I might want or need access to later on, I put up here. If I develop total amnesia, I want to be able to read this thing and fake it well enough so no one will realize I’m not me anymore.
Good. I’m glad that’s clear. Now, make with the recipes.
D.
Spicy Eggplant with Ground Pork or variations thereof. Ooh, and Baingan Bharta. Loves me some eggplants, I does.
Oh, and all those Thai curry dishes with green peas? Done properly, those peas should actually be teeny, tiny eggplants. They taste totally different, but you need to live in an area with a large Thai population to find the right eggplant…
Totally different from the peas that are usually substituted, that is…
Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! Thanks, ps.
Alternatively, watch your back in dark alleys, lest an astute, well schooled, bespectacled and somewhat scruffy looking blog reader decides that life as a Californian ENT surgeon with a loving Vulcan wife and child has some perverse appeal.
Ooh, I love eggplant, but I’ve always been afraid to cook it, for some reason. So, I’m looking forward to some good recipes. Anyone got a good one for caponata, preferably with raisins?
Yum. I have no eggplant recipes beyond the usual parmiagan or baba ganoush. We don’t do eggplants in this house. Nor do we do green peppers. Alas, my husband is anti-eggplant.
A lament: I miss the aubergines! The unique color of their skin, their yummy mooshiness when cooked too much.
D.N. — I think the old Vegetarian Epicure cookbook (vol. 2) has a good, basic caponata recipe.
Another source for good caponata recipes: Passover menus for Sephardic & Italian Jews. One year, we served an amazing caponata-like relish that stood in for the haroset.
Check Is My Blog Burning to see who’s hosting the next Paper Chef.
Paper Chef’s like Sugar High Friday. Different bloggers host it each time, and DG’s not the originator of Paper Chef.
microsoar: truly perverse, at that!
DN: welcome back. And now I have to google caponata.
Kate: I got Summer’s book in the mail yesterday. How did you get Geena Davis to model the cover?
ps: eggplant haroset — cool!
May: thanks for the tip. So Paper Chef is a movable feast, eh?
We refer to our morbidly obese guinea pigs as ‘Les Jolies Aubergines”. Would a guinea pig recipe count?
Gweep! Though I don’t think they’d make a good caponata. Or baba ganoush, for that matter.
(Gee, I wonder why that recipe doesn’t show up in the English version of the site?)
Eggplant dolma. “Patlican Tolma”, as my grandfather pronounced it.
Get about two or three one pound eggplants. (Firm, no bruises, very glossy and heavy.) Carve out the flesh, leaving about an inch of flesh near the skin. (Chop the flesh into cubes and salt it in a colander.) Brush the halves with olive oil (or lamb fat if you’re being authentic) and roast flesh side down in a medium hot oven until they mostly collapse. Sprinkle zaatar over the flesh and leave to cool. (Zaatar is thyme, sumac, cumin, and oregano, and sometimes other stuff too.)
Saute a chopped onion and some garlic with about a pound of ground lamb. Season with pepper and a good amount of dried mint (no salt). Add the eggplant cubes and cook until they start mushing down. (The salt from the eggplants are usually enough for me, but you can add more to the mixture if you want at the end.) Add fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes well drained. Dried currants can go in at this point, or pine nuts, or more chopped vegetables, or a handful of uncooked rice, or sesame seeds, or more zaatar, etc.
Pile the filling into the eggplant halves and roast them until filling is hot all the way through (rice is cooked if you added it) and the skin looks, um, done.
Serve warm with pilaf and warm yogurt sauce. Watch Suisan melt under the table. (Greek and Lebanese versions do sometimes garnish with feta before roasting. Armenians I grew up with weren’t really into cheese. It can look a bit naked when it comes out of the oven. That’s were warm mazoun comes in.
(Warm yogurt sauce (“mazoun drippings”) with hot onions — favorite over steamed green beans. Saute onions in oil until wilted and translucent. Add a LOT of cayenne pepper until onions turn red. Take off heat. Warm yogurt over very low heat. Add a bit of chicken broth to thin it if needed. Serve in a bowl with garnish of hot onions on the top along with either dried or fresh mint and salt. If serving over green beans, put green beans on plate, smother with spicy onions and dress with warm yogurt.) (We actually never called it yogurt in our house until the mid 1980s. It was always mazoun. Then Dannon and Columbo made “yogurt” popular and we started calling it yogurt too. But grudgingly.)
Why did that guinea pig discussion make me flash on Will it Blend?
Suisan, xxxxxoo. Nuff said.
Cuy con Coke can! There’s only one question: will it blend!?
Gweep.
I’ve been trying to convince our cuys to eat the oregano that is taking over our back lawn, thinking it’d season ’em nicely, but apparently an IQ of 2.5 is smart enough to see through that ploy.
I’m starting to think I may have to venture into the world of eggplant cuisine, based on some of the above.
I think I might try a variation on Suisan’s recipe — buffalo meat instead of ground lamb (couldn’t find any baaaaa in the market today), mozzarella instead of feta (in deference to Jake). I struck out last night, big time, with a weird teriyaki beef concoction which we all hated. Maybe I shouldn’t risk my luck tonight.
sexkitten — My guinea pigs enjoy cilantro and parsley immensely. Marjoram and thyme too, but not to the levels of cilantro and parsley love.
They hate oregano and mint. Apparently they are ready to become a nice little fajita-like dish, not an Italian based or Mediterranean casserole. Sigh.
(OMG. If some of my animal rights friends/guinea pig rescuers ever see this comment I’m going to get lynched. *joking on eating the guinea pigs* *joking*)
Doug– I made this tonight. I sorta want to sprinkle cheese over the top, but can’t quite bring myself to do so. Left the currants out in deference to my kidlets. We’ll see if they eat it.
My guinea pigs seem to avoid anything with flavour. They love iceberg lettuce, corn husks, and any lawn clippings not involving herbs. I guess they have some silly aversion to being eaten.
1. Place whole eggplant into 320 degree oven (pierce 1st).
2. Bake for 2 hours.
3. Wrap whole thing in aluminum and let cool.
4. Cut away skin and process remainder with stuff.
5. Spread on things. Eat.
Stuff: (onions/garlic, parsley/other herbs, tahini, olive oil, spices … other available items like chickpeas, peppers, scallions…)
Love that photo!
‘Kay folks, that’s Bix’s baba ghanouj recipe I linked to above.
Bix, I
stoleborrowed that photo. I’m not that sterling a photographer.Italian-style eggplant where it’s rubbery and still visibly eggplant – yuck! I had a very unpleasant eggplant parm experience at the house of my then-quasi-boyfriend’s mother. Very bad! Then I moved to India and discovered the glory of flamed roasted eggplant in baingan bharta. The key for my taste is to roast the eggplant over an open flame (go, gas stoves!). I try it at every Indian restaurant I go to. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not so. Do I make it myself? No, I do not. Why? Because my cook made it and I didn’t get a recipe.
Have to second the recommendation for the tiny, green pea-resembling eggplants in Thai curries. Yum!
Check for recipes for Eggplant Caviar (yet another variant of the eggplant dip).
I was always intimidated with these big colorful gourdy things. That changed when I decided to just bake them whole! These probably aren’t the most accurate baba ghanoush recipes, but they get the job done 🙂
Thank you for the link Doug!
And it takes a good eye to spot a good gourd. You must have a good eye for gourds 🙂
Hi Kira! Yup, I need to experiment with baingan bharta. Might even convince Jake of the wonderfulness of eggplant that way.
Bix, I see something very sensuous in that photo. A great big purple tumescent EGGPLANT! Oh how I love eggplant.
Hi there – Paper Chef is actually hosted here: http://www.tomatilla.com, and very frequently guest hosted elsewhere. But I run it and have been out of blogging for a few months. I am about to put up the 24th roundup (there have been 24 of them) and then restart the whole thing again for September. So keep an eye out for the next challenge…and welcome to Paper Chef!