Vankaya gasagasala kura

or eggplant poppy-seed curry. This strikes me as an odd combination, but it is, aparently, a standard Andhra-syle dish.

Indian poppy seeds are a different sort than the European variety we use in the U.S. For starters, they're white and, although it's tough to tell scale from the pictures, I think they're bigger. That's why the dish can call for grinding them to a paste when all my efforts to grind my poppy seeds came to naught. I have no idea if they taste any differently. Or, now that I think about it, if Indian eggplants taste any diferently from what I'm using. In any case, the dish turned out OK even if it's entirely different from what the author (Sailaja of the Sailu's Kitchen website) intended.

Ingredients:

3/4 pound eggplant, peeled, halved and sliced 3/4-inch thick
2 Tablespoons oil

3/4 teaspoons whole mustard seeds
3/4 teaspoons whole cumin seeds

1 1/2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons coriander powder
1/4 teaspoon fenugreek powder
1/4 teaspoon cumin powder

2 cloves garlic
a knob of ginger of similar size to 2 cloves of garlic
pinch salt

2 cups water
4 1/2 Tablespoons poppy seeds, toasted and a good-faith attempt made at grinding them into a paste
2 Tablespoons light brown sugar or that solid chunk sugar if you've got it
2 inch diameter lump of tamarind pulp, dissolved

1. Heat half the oil to shimmering over a medium-high heat and add the eggplant slices, in batches if necessary. Cook on both sides until well-browned and translucent. Set eggplant aside.

2. Meanwhile, mix the cayenne, coriander, fenugreek and cumin with a judicious amount of salt.

3. Grind the garlic and ginger into a paste with a bit more salt.

4. Reduce heat to medium low and add the rest of the oil to the pan. When the oil shimmers again add the mustard seeds. When they pop add the cumin. When those pop add the garlic/ginger paste. Cook, stirring, until fragrant or the garlic threatens to brown whichever comes first.

5. Add the mixed spices, stir and cook until differently fragrant. Add the water, turn the heat back up to high, and bring to a boil. Add the poppy seeds and sugar. Strain in the tamarind. Cook for 8 minutes, stirring every few minutes to ensure nothing sticks to the pan. Be skeptical that this could possibly turn into a proper sauce.

6. Return the eggplant to the pan, turn the heat down to medium-low and cook for 15 minutes until the eggplant is falling apart and, wonder-of-wonders, the sauce has thickened to a gravy-like consistancy.

Serve with rice, roti, or, if it's all you've got, naan. Possibly you could get away with flour tortillas.

Not the world's most attractive dish, but curries rarely photograph well. The eggplant is meltingly soft in a thick gravy. The rich flavors of sweet tamarind and mellow spice dominate but the eggplant adds earthiness and the poppy seeds give a toasty aftertaste. Using a piece of naan as a scoop brings out the toastiness and rebalances the flavors nicely. It also hides the gritiness of all those unground poppy seeds. Also, it's pretty cool how the dish makes its own spice-oil condiment as the oil absorbed by the eggplant in step 1 are released, pick up the oil-soluble flavors and float to the top.

So, overall, tasty, but not really presentable to company.

CSA week three - eggplant and dandelion pasta bake

This isn't anything terribly innovative, complex or exciting, but basic recipes are more popular over time and this is the only thing I've cooked in the last few days so here it is.

On second thought, maybe this is complex. Everything gets tossed together in the end, but many of the ingredients needed to be pre-cooked and that ends up taking some doing. Here, to start, are a can of diced tomato in sauce simmering on the back burner; onions, peppers and mushrooms sweating on the left; and the dandelion greens blanching on the right.

When the onion mix was done I reused the pan to soften and slightly brown the eggplant (in batches as I used four Chinese eggplants) and reused the (now well-flavored) pot of water to cook a half pound of ziti to al dente.

I reused the pan again to brown a half pound of sweet Italian sausage and several cloves of garlic.

All that got mixed together with some fresh basil, cubed mozzarella, a load of ricotta, a good bit of Parmesan and finally the tomato sauce. That all went into a baking pan for 30 minutes at 350 degrees and a few more under the broiler. Despite all the prep, this went pretty quickly and it was in the oven no more than 45 minutes after I started cooking. Even more conveniently, all that prep could easily be done the day before, although I wouldn't mix in the pasta until the last minute.


The end result is unsightly, but certainly tasty enough. The dandelion is the only unusual addition here and I think it works quite well with the eggplant, retaining a good bit of flavor and not dissolving into green flecks the way spinach would have. The emphasis on eggplant over cheese means that it falls apart on the plate, which is bad for presentation but makes it a lot easier to actually eat.

I wonder if I could have added structure by peeling the eggplant and cooking it down into a baba ganoush-ish paste so it would be part of the spackle instead of more chunks to be held together. I do like it's firmness as is, though, since the pasta is maybe a minute overdone, though. In retrospect, I probably should have poured the tomato sauce over top after baking instead of mixing it in. That would have helped both keep the pasta firm and it would have avoided thinning out the cheese.

Anyway, a good use of a lot of eggplant and easy enough for a Monday night.

CSA week two - Stuffed eggplant in black bean sauce

I started this dish with a recipe by Richard Ng, the owner/chef of Bo Lings in Kansas City. The original recipe calls for slicing the eggplant into thick rounds, slicing a pocket into each, stuffing them with shrimp, deep frying them, making a sauce from scratch, dipping them in the sauce and then steaming them.

I changed it a bit to emphasize the eggplant over the shrimp and simplified it so it was suitable not just as a weekday dinner, but as a weekday after going shopping and discovering that Whole Foods doesn't carry dried shrimp any more so you can't do the callaloo recipe you wanted to and they also don't have creamed corn so you can't do the back-up recipe either, not as written anyway, dinner.

Instead of cutting the eggplant rounds, I just cut it lengthwise (and then across so so it would fit in the steamer), sliced off a little bit of the skin side so it would sit flat and then scooped out a shallow trench to put the shrimp in.

The shrimp, instead of cutting into pea-sized pieces and stirring for four minutes until it gets sticky, I just blended (with the scooped out eggplant) in a food processor into a coarse paste. Shamefully, I didn't even bother to devein them. I did season them with generous salt and white pepper, I should mention.

Instead of deep frying, I browned the eggplant on both sides in just a Tablespoon or two of oil. Since I made boats instead of sandwiches, I did this before stuffing the shrimp in.

As the eggplant cooled, I made the sauce. I started with Lee Kum Kee prepared black bean garlic sauce and doctored it up with a little of soy sauce, sugar, rice wine and sesame oil--all the ingredients in the recipe that weren't in the ingredient list on the bottle-- until I got the flavor in the right neighborhood. Then I added a little corn starch so the sauce would thicken up during steaming and stick to the eggplant better.

I flipped the eggplant boats over, spooned a little sauce over the bottoms, flipped them back, stuffed them with the shrimp mixture, put them into the steamer (in the same pot I fried them in earlier), spooned some more sauce over top, covered and steamed for 13 minutes. That's it.


I think I missed the mark on the sauce, but not too badly. It thickened up a little too much, but the flavor's pretty close to what I've had at dim sum places. The salty deeply savory richness pairs well with the sweet eggplant and shrimp, but it's maybe a little bitter. I should have added a little more sugar and it could have used some ginger too. Visually, it could be a lot more appealing, I'll grant you.

The thicker pieces of eggplant is falling apart, but the thin end holds together well. The deep frying in the original recipe must drive out enough moisture that it firms up and can survive the steaming better. The texture of the shrimp is pretty good, though--a nice meaty chew.

Overall, not bad at all for a quick dinner. The biggest problem was that it was best hot out of the steamer, but cooled down quick while I took pictures and stopped to write up my impressions. I'm not used to that happening in Miami. Weird.

CSA week three - Thai basil eggplant

There are lots of recipes on the web for Thai dishes using basil and eggplant. Mostly they're just: fry eggplant, add soy sauce and basil, serve over rice. That not only isn't going to satisfy me, I wouldn't get a blog post out of it. So I started with the most complicated recipe I could find (which, as a bonus, uses the bell pepper) and messed with it.

Ingredients:
1 medium-sized European eggplant, sliced into 1"-square cross-section strips
1 1/2 suntan bell peppers (or one red and one green), sliced into short broad strips
1 medium onion, chopped into pieces roughly the same size as the pepper pieces
hot peppers to taste, finely chopped
all the garlic left in the house, finely chopped (up to 3 Tablespoons, but I only managed 1)
1 generous handful Thai basic, roughly chopped

3 Tablespoons Thai fish sauce
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon brown sugar
1 chicken thigh, deboned, deskinned and cut into bite-sized pieces (meat is optional, but I'm compensating for less eggplant than the 3 Chinese eggplants the original recipe called for. If you want to stay vegetarian bar the fish sauce, tofu would be fine or just reduce the amount of onions and peppers.)
1/2-3/4 cup warm water

2 teaspoons corn starch
2 Tablespoons warm water

Instructions:
1. Mix fish sauce, soy sauce and brown sugar. Add the chicken and put it in the refrigerator to marinate. Mix the cornstarch and 2 Tablespoons water.

2. Heat a wok over high heat until it's smoking hot. Add a Tablespoon of cooking oil, the eggplant and a pinch of salt. Fry, stirring frequently for 5 minutes, until the eggplant is softened and, in spots, browned. Remove eggplant to a large bowl.

3. Heat another 1 Tablespoon of oil. Add onions and bell peppers and cook for 5 minutes, until both are softened and a little browned and the onions turn translucent. Remove to the bowl with the eggplant.

3. Heat a third Tablespoon of oil. Add the garlic, hot pepper and fry briefly. Add the chicken (drained of the marinade) and cook until the chicken loses its pinkness. Add the vegetables and mix thoroughly. Add the marinade, and a judicious amount of the warm water. Wait until the water starts boiling and add the basil then cook for at least one minute. When everything looks about right to you, add the cornstarch and take off the heat. Stir until the sauce turns glossy and thickens.

Serve over rice, noodles or a salad.

Hmm...not bad, but not fabulous. The texture of the vegetables is just right--soft but with a little firmness left to the bite. But the sauce isn't quite as flavorful as I'd like. A bit more fish sauce, a squeeze of lime and a whole lot of sriracha wakes it up, but the balance is off. Stock instead of water would help, but I think I just don't have enough flavorings for this much vegetation. Maybe my ratios were off.How big are medium-sized Chinese eggplants anyway?

Chicken eggplant croquettes

Are they still croquettes if they're flat? I'm going to say yes (obviously, otherwise this post would have a different name). Croquette translates to small crunchy thing. There's no specification of a shape there so I think I'm safe.

At the end of my Zuni Café chicken post I left you wondering just what I was going to do with the half a chicken I had left over. I was wondering myself as no good ideas were presenting themselves. Plus I also had an eggplant that I really needed to get around to using.

Without a whole lot of thought as to the end results I peeled, salted and wrung out the eggplant, and then fried it in olive oil along with the leftover chicken skin to add a bit of interest. I let that go for around 15 minutes over a fairly low heat to get it caramelized to a deep brown. When those were done I had gotten into a caramelization mood so I sliced a half an onion thin, lowered the heat under the pan and let them get nice and brown too.

Meanwhile I shredded the cold chicken. When the onions were done I returned the eggplant (minus the crispy chicken skin which I couldn't resist snacking on) and added the chicken along with the leftover au jus sauce I had made from the drippings. I mixed that all together to blend the flavors and heat the chicken through, dumped it all out into a bowl and deglazed the pan with surprisingly tart chardonnay. And finally I chopped up a couple small tomatoes a mixed them in since dishes with chicken and eggplant usually use some tomato too.

So I had this hash sort of stuff. I tried a little as a taco filling, but that didn't really work for me, so I started looking around for some other use. Nothing better presenting itself, I decided to try a fritter.

The mixture was rather chunky so I ran it through the food processor which probably wasn't entirely necessary for a decent fritter, but seemed like a good idea at the time. The result was a paste. For a bit I considered making meatballs, but I knew it was only holding together due to congealed gelatin. Heat it up and it would fall apart. It still needed a binder.

I beat an egg, mixed that in, and then a half cup of flour and a teaspoon of baking powder. The whole mix had only been seasoned with salt and pepper to this point so I had free reign as to how to punch it up now. I seriously considered Moroccan, but settled on a sweet West Indian spice mix that I thought would work better with the caramel flavors I had developed. (I really couldn't taste it in the end version, so I dusted a bit more over top along with a squeeze of lemon.)

That rested for a half hour to hydrate and then it was time to cook. I used a Tablespoon scoop to measure out portions, flattened them out in the pan to make patties and shallow fried them until golden brown and crisp.



It wasn't until I bit into one that I discovered the distinctive creamy interior of a croquette. I also found, unfortunately, that the lovely flavor I had developed in the eggplant was hidden under the fried onion and the pan dripping flavor of the au jus. It wasn't bad, but not quite as good as I hoped. Even if the eggplant doesn't get its due flavor-wise, it does do a great job texturally and with a lot less starch than your average croquette. I do think I'm on to something interesting there. I'd like to try this again with the vegetables sweated instead of browned to rebalance the flavors.

CSA week 19 - Semur terong

which would be steamed eggplant in dark sauce. Eggplant stew is the exact translation from Indonesian, but that doesn't tell you much. "Dark sauce" is all that helpful either, I suppose.

Anyway, I didn't much feel like cooking tonight. I've been suffering from the dreaded oogy tummy syndrome lately. But even if I don't want to eat, I've still got to blog so here we are.

This is a modestly modified version of a recipe from my go to Indonesian cookbook The Indonesian Kitchen. I really ought to get another one of these days just to compare the different takes on the cuisine.

Ingredients:
1 pound eggplant, cut horizontally in 1/2 inch thick slices
1 egg, beaten with 1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup thin-sliced onion
1/4 cup thin-sliced pepper
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 cup beef or chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg (less if it's fresh)
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons sweet soy sauce

1. Steam eggplant slices for five minutes. Remove and cool. (I had to pile up my eggplant to fit them all in the steamer. A dual level Chinese-style bamboo steamer might have room to lay everything out. I also found that the eggplant started falling apart as I removed it to a bowl. I decided to just go with that.)

2. Dip eggplant in egg and fry in 4 Tablespoons oil over medium high heat for two to three minutes, until light brown on both sides. (Individually dipping each slice in egg, even if they were holding together, would be a huge pointless pain so I just tossed the eggplant with the egg and dumped it all into a hot pan.) Remove and set aside.

3. Add remaining 2 Tablespoons of oil to pan, heat and add onion, garlic and peppers. Fry two minutes. Add stock, salt, sugar, nutmeg, pepper and sweet soy sauce. Cook three minutes more. Return eggplant and cook two minutes. Serve over rice.



Not much to look at, particularly with the eggplant all broken up like that, but, well, it's not much to taste either. It's rather bland and mushy. Just what my stomach can handle, but that wasn't my intention.

My cookbook has a second semur terong recipe which has made its way out onto the open web, so you can find it here. In retrospect, that looks rather better. Make that instead.

CSA week eight - Eggplant casserole rehabilitated

No point in wasting good food or even food that isn't so good I figure so I wanted to see if I could salvage my unpleasantly heavy eggplant casserole.

The process was hindered somewhat by the casserole already being assembled and cooked. It would have been nice to be able to disassemble the casserole into its component parts. Failing that I decided to chop it up into little squares, dump them into a bowl and mash it all up into a big pile of eggplanty, sausagey, cheesy glunk.


Then I boiled up nine whole wheat lasagne noodles and made a simple tomato sauce spiked with the fresh oregano and thyme from this weeks CSA share, red pepper flakes plus a good dose of red wine vinegar for some acidity to cut through all the oil. I also wanted to add some greens so I prepared the komatsuna and turnip leaves along with some baby spinach I had in the fridge. I didn't want to add any more fat so I wilted them in the pasta water instead of in a pan. Should have added the zucchini too? Nah.



Everything went into the baking dish in the standard way: a layer of tomato sauce, a layer of noodles, half the glunk, half the greens, more sauce, more noodles, the rest of the glunk, the rest of the greens, the final three noodles, the rest of the sauce and a bit of leftover cheese and some fresh grated Parmesan.



And into a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes to get it all melty and bubbling again.




The result is a substantial improvement. There's no indication that the dish had a previous incarnation. The over-powerful cheese is now nicely balanced with the other flavors and textures. It's just a passable but undistinguished lasagne. But that sure beats a barely edible casserole.

CSA week seven - Eggplant and Colombian chorizo casserole

I need to stop picking up vegetables from the extras bin. I was nearly caught up this week, but I grabbed a second eggplant and it needed to be cooked. I had picked out an Arabian chickpea-eggplant stew to make, but the flavors were pretty close to the caponata I made earlier (minus the ginger and curry powder), so I was hesitating.

I saw in this week's New York Times Dining section is a profile of Donald Link, a New Orleans chef who is bringing authentic Cajun to New Orleans in contrast to the bastardized version that became popular in the wake of Paul Prudhomme prominence in the 1980's. A couple of his recipes accompanied the article and I was interested in this one:

Eggplant and Merguez Casserole

Adapted from Donald Link

Time: 55 minutes

FOR THE BéCHAMEL:

4 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg.

For the casserole:

Olive oil, as needed
1 large (18 to 20 ounces) eggplant, peeled and sliced into
1/4-inch-thick rounds
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
9 ounces merguez sausage
12 ounces fontina cheese, grated
6 ounces Parmesan cheese, grated.

1. For the béchamel: In a small saucepan over low heat, melt butter. Add flour and whisk until pale golden, about 5 minutes. Add milk, salt, white pepper and nutmeg, and whisk to combine thoroughly. Cook, whisking frequently, until thickened and smooth, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

2. For the casserole: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spread eggplant slices in a single layer on a baking sheet, and thoroughly coat both sides with olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and black pepper. Roast until fully cooked, 12 to 15 minutes, then remove from heat but do not turn off oven. Meanwhile, in a medium skillet over medium-low heat, sauté merguez until browned and fully cooked. Remove from heat and slice into 1/4-inch-thick rounds.

3. Oil an 8-by-11, 2-inch-deep baking dish. Spread one-third of béchamel in baking dish. Top with half the eggplant, then half the fontina and half the merguez. Coat with half of the remaining béchamel. Top with remaining eggplant, fontina and merguez. Spread with remaining béchamel and the Parmesan.

4. Bake until hot, bubbling and lightly browned, 12 to 15 minutes. Allow to rest for a minute or two, then serve.

Yield: 6 servings.


The merguez is north African so I'm assuming it's substituting for some downhome alligator sausage that you can't get outside the bayou. That means I don't have to feel bad about substituting for it since, unsurprisingly, I couldn't find any. Merguez I know is heavily spiced both with hot pepper and other flavors so looking over my options at Publix, I decided on Colombian chorizo. I've never tried it, but it looks like it's got a lot of character.


Next up is the cheese. That's quite a lot of $20/pound cheese there so I decided to compromise a little. I used half proper fontina and half fontinella which I assumed to be closely related. It's actually rather sharper and a somewhat less creamy, although it still melted fine. For the Parmesan I mainly used a young domestic type and suplemented that with a nicely aged authentic Parmigiano Reggiano. The milder taste of taste of the domestic should balance with the sharpness of the fontinella and get me somewhere in the right flavor area.



One other thing worth noting is the instruction to "thoroughly coat both sides [of the eggplant slices] with olive oil. You know as well as I do that eggplant does not coat with oil, it soaks up oil. I realized afterward that he probably meant for me to use one of those olive oil spray pumps. I drizzled and spread the oil as best I could but it didn't really coat and I used a lot more oil than I really wanted to.

Another point is to be careful with the salt. I forgot just how salty all that cheese would be so I was generous on the eggplant and the final dish is a bit over-salted.

That all said, here's the result: A little bit of eggplant and a few pieces of sausage floating in a goopy, tangy, cheesy mess (with a nice crispy top). Just looking at it as it cooled made me break out the lettuce and cherry tomatoes I've been ignoring all week so I could fill up on salad in self-defense.

It turns out the chorizo I chose wasn't a bad match with the eggplant and cheese so it's all rather tasty, but it's eggplant, cheese and sausage so no surprise there.

But it's so heavy it's hard to enjoy. How to lighten it up? Well, first, spraying the eggplant instead of soaking it. I could slice the sausage before frying it to let some of that fat escape. I suppose low fat cheese is an option, but I'm philosophically opposed to such things. Can you make a decent béchamel with 2 percent milk? Beyond that, why not turn it into lasagna? Layers of pasta would space things out a bit. Couldn't hurt to add some onions and peppers too while I'm at it. Any other ideas?

CSA week seven - Eggplant caponata

This is a recipe by Todd English, chef and the restaurateur behind the Olives restaurants and a bunch of others, too. If you've seen his show Food Trip or seen him interviewed you'll know that his schtick, at the Olives locations anyway, is pan-Mediterranean--bringing together all of the cuisines where olives grow by adulterating dishes a variety of foreign (but not too foreign) substances.

I've seen him putting these dishes together on Food Trip and generally the results don't look all that appealing to me. I'm fine with complicating a recipe with lots of fiddly little additions, but I try to stick with classic combination of flavors within a cuisine or, if I stray, take the flavors entirely over to the new cuisine. But then, I'm just some schmuck with a blog and he's a restaurateur with sufficient reputation to sell out to Home Shopping Network. So when I saw this recipe (and you don't see a lot of his recipes floating around the web. Probably because they're a pain to make without a sou chef helping out.) I thought I'd give it a shot and see how one of his recipes actually tastes.

Caponata is a traditional Sicilian appetizer served on crostini; it's eggplant, tomatoes, a bit of vinegar and capers, maybe some olives--that's about it. English starts off by adding a big pile of sausage which is such an unusual addition that Google doubts that's what I mean when I search for "caponata sausage". So this thing is going off the rails even before we get to the orange juice and curry powder. I've got my reservations but it's got some intriguingly odd combinations; take a look:

Todd English's Eggplant Caponata

Ingredients:
1 eggplant, peeled and cut in medium dice
12 ounces sweet Italian sausage
2 tablespoons olive oil

3 garlic cloves, minced
1 small red onion, peeled and minced

1 teaspoon minced fresh peeled ginger
1/2 cup golden raisins
1 teaspoons chopped capers
1 cup chopped fresh or canned tomatoes
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup orange juice
1 tablespoon curry powder
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon honey
1/4 to 1 cup water

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil leaves
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary leaves
2 tablespoons chopped scallions

1. Place a large non stick pan over a medium heat and when it is hot, add the eggplant. Cook until the eggplant is golden brown on all sides, about 10-15 minutes. Remove the eggplant and set it aside.

2. Reheat the pan, add the sausage and cook over medium high heat until golden brown, about 7 minutes. Remove the sausage, discard the fat. When the sausage is cool enough to handle, roughly chop it.

3. Reheat the pan an add the oil. Add the garlic and onion and cook for 2 minutes.
Add the reserved sausage, raisins, ginger root, capers, tomatoes, salt, orange juice, curry powder, pepper flakes, honey, reserved eggplant and 1/4 cup water, stirring well after each addition.

4. Reduce the heat to medium low and cook until the eggplant is soft and the mixture is chunky and saucey, adding more water if necessary, or about 30 minutes.

5. Remove the pan from the heat and add the vinegar, basil, cilantro, parsley, rosemary and scallions. Serve at room temperature.

So is it any good? Well, if you like oranges and raisins, sure, as it's hard to taste anything pat the sweetly curried fruit. But it's a nice enough curry and the flavors are more harmonious than I expected; when you get a bit of eggplant or sausage that retains some identity, the sauce does compliment them well enough. I will say that the Mediterranean fusion thing is a bust. Change the sausage to something north African and you'd have no clue of an Italian origin. It's a fine enough dish, but is it a good caponata? I'd say no, but I'm not judging a caponata cooking competition here so I don't suppose it really matters. I kind of regret not trying something more classic instead . When you cook from a recipe do you prefer to stay traditional or a chefs' idiosyncratic creations?

CSA week five - Oseng oseng hijau and sayur lodeh

OK, I admit that last post was pretty lame. If I didn't have to correct the record on sautéing callaloo I wouldn't have posted it at all. To make up for that I'm going to give you a bonus recipe in this post. I made a couple of recipes from central Java tonight and, while you've got everything you need for the sautéed lettuce, you're unlikely to have the ingredients I used in the eggplant stew. I had to mail order them in. I'll append a recipe for semur terong--steamed eggplant in dark sauce--that I like. The only unusual ingredient in that is sweet soy sauce. That you can find locally or you can fake it by using regular soy sauce and a little dark brown sugar. If you're interested in those other ingredients, I talk a bit about them in this post.

Let's start with the sayur lodeh. It's got lots of ingredients but it's really easy. I put:
1 red sweet pepper, cubed
1/4 cup onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 salam leaf
1 piece of laos
1/4 teaspoon Chinese shrimp paste
1/2 teaspoon tamarind paste dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 kemiri nut, crushed
and
1 cup chicken broth
into my dutch oven, brought it to a boil, turned down the heat to medium and cooked it all for five minutes.
Then I added
1 cup coconut milk
and
1 pound eggplant, cut in 1 inch cubes.
I brought it back to a boil and simmered uncovered for ten minutes, stirring frequently until the eggplant was soft but not falling apart. And that was it.

My cookbook, The Indonesian Kitchen, says you can substitute 2 cups of string beans and 1 cup of cabbage for the eggplant, but I really like the way the eggplant has absorbed the spiced coconut broth. It would probably cling to the cabbage, but it would run right off of the beans. If I were making it with the alternative vegetables I think I'd fish them out and then reduce the broth to a saucier consistency.



The Oseng oseng hijau has an odd ingredient list that avoids the typical Javanese flavors:
2 Tablespoons onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 Tablespoon butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup water
1 head lettuce, torn or cut into coarse chunks. The Indonesian Kitchen suggests Boston or Romaine lettuce but I used the komatsuna.

1. Melt the butter in a wok or large pan over medium heat. When the butter has stopped sizzling add the onion and garlic. (I accidentally browned the butter. Whoops!)

2. Fry the onion and garlic in the butter for three minutes. Add the salt, pepper and water, cook for a minute and add the lettuce.

3. Turn the heat up to high and stir fry the lettuce for three more minutes until the lettuce is wilted but retains some texture.

The komatsuna works nicely here because you get two textures with the wilted leaves and firmer stems. The buttery lettuce is not bad just like that, but I thought the dish woke up when I added a little bit of sweet soy sauce. Clearly there's no real reason to stick with Indonesian condiments here but you'll probably want to add a shot of something.

And here's the Steamed Eggplant in Dark Sauce

Ingredients:
1 pound eggplant, cut horizontally in 1/2 inch thick slices
1 egg, beaten with 1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup thin-sliced onion
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 cup beef or chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons sweet soy sauce

1. Steam the eggplant slices in a Chinese-style steamer for five minutes. Remove and allow to cool.

2. Dip the eggplant in the egg and fry in 4 Tablespoons of oil for two minutes or until light brown on both sides. Set aside.

3. Fry the onion and garlic in the remaining 2 Tablespoons of oil for two minutes. Add the stock, salt, sugar, nutmeg, pepper and sweet soy sauce. Cook for three minutes. Return the eggplant and cook, basting for two minutes.

It's been a while since I've made this but I recall liking how the nutmeg combined with the sweet soy sauce and how the resulting flavor complimented the eggplant.

CSA week three - Roasted ratatouille

Just a short note on this simple dish. I attempted to follow the recipe by Clotilde Dusoulier at the Chocolate and Zuchini blog that I pointed out earlier but had some small difficulty.

First off, it's one of those annoying recipes that feed a crowd but don't mention it. In fact, it's actively misleading since it says to put all of the sliced vegetables into a pan, but it would take a restaurant pan to fit them all.

I halved the recipe and still used both my 13x9 and 11x8 pans. Maybe that's optional; I kept the vegetables to a single layer to maximize the benefits of roasting, but you don't really have to if you just want to get everything cooked. I'm going make the other half tonight and I'll just pile everything up and stir it occassionally to compare and contrast.

Now that I take another look, Clotilde just assumes the reader knows what size to cut the vegetables, whether to stir, what size pan to use, how to judge when things are done. I managed to figure it out and so did a lot of other commentators on the post. Maybe I should give my readers more credit.

Anyway, I added some chicken sausage to the veges to make it more of a main dish, and used oregano instead of rosemary to make it a bit more Italian to match the sausage but otherwise I just chopped everything up into big chunks, tossed with salt pepper and olive oil and stuck it into the oven for a half hour covered with foil and a half hour without and the results were just dandy (although another 15 minutes for extra roastiness would have been worth the minor drying out I was worried about).

On the other hand, they were a just dandy roasted vegetable mix and not really a proper ratatouille to my mind. Maybe it's just me, but if the vegetables aren't melting into each other and blending flavors it's not quite right. I found a dash of balsamic vinegar tied things together well. Clotilde suggests a poached egg. Some mild feta or goat cheese would work too. Why not all three?

I think for the second batch I'm going to toss in some southern-style smoked sausages and add fresh sage to match flavors. These vegetables are so common they can match with a wide variety of flavor profiles and still work.