Vietnamese Hmong Spicy Eggplant

I found a new, wonderful website. It's not new, but it's new to me: VietWorldKitchen. I was reading about pho', but then I saw this recipe, and it basically made my day. Maybe it was a slow day, but, oh, how I love eggplant. I didn't have any scallions or cilantro, and I only had dried chilies, so I kind of massacred the recipe, but it worked out well in the end, and I got to use my mortar and pestle, which is basically my goal in life.

I boiled my eggplants whole in some water, turning them to cook them through (they were the long, thin kind, so slightly less bitter than the big purple ones. They were at a very good price at my farmers' markets). Then I let them cool while I chopped some fresh mint (it's what I had. I didn't know if it would be a good replacement for cilantro, but I figured I'd give it a go. Oh, I also threw 8 red chilies into the eggplant-boiling liquid to resuscitate them. The recipe calls for fresh, but no way was I going to go out and buy eight chilies when they probably wouldn't even end up being the right kind anyway. So I sliced my resuscitated (and slightly boiled...) chilies open, got rid of the hot seeds (the seeds don't add flavour, just burning heat) and threw the flesh into the mortar and pestle with the salt and mint.  I just skipped the scallion, but I could have added some diced shallot if I'd wanted.

Now the fun part - the mashing. You crush it all up with the pestle. There is good mortar and pestle technique and then there's bad.  Mine is lacking. I watched an episode of Poh's Kitchen (you can find the podcast on iTunes for free) where she talks about it, but it's a small screen on my iPod and I'm maybe a slow learner. Anyway, everything got mashed in the end, and that's the point, really. You're now supposed to mash in the peeled eggplant, so I mashed a little at a time, and then just mashed in another bigger bowl (carefully!). The above picture is what came out. Oh it was so good. My chilies weren't Thai chilies so the heat was different, but my goodness it was hot. Now I love heat. I LOVE heat, but this was really, really hot. I ate a lot of it anyway, because the flavour was still SO good (my tongue could still find flavour through the slightly mind-numbing heat), but if you are scared of heat, I'd say use 2-3 chilies only. You're missing all the fun, and colour, but you won't have a fit on the flour. Not that I did.

Oh, the mint worked out nicely in the end.

Finally! Home-Made Noodles in Home-Made Broth

There's something so comforting about noodle soup. I've ranted more than enough about the wonders of pho', the layer of fat, making the rich broth, browning or not browning bones, the hours of simmering, the straining, and the intensifying of flavour. I've also talked enough about my pasta maker and my new-found love of gluten-free flour blends.

So I'd had some fresh fusilli pasta sitting in my freezer along with a big container of home-made lamb broth for a few weeks. These were the practical things for this meal. The inspiration came from "Beyond the Great Wall", whose recipes of the ethnic minorities of China include a whole lot of soups with noodles, made from big hunks of meat simmered down. A meal isn't a meal without soup, and broth isn't broth without a whole lot of long simmering. The above-pictured soup is very much not Chinese (fusilli?), but it is very much traditionally-made. I took the best broth I'd ever made (a day's-worth of browning, simmering and reducing), brought it to a boil, and tossed in my frozen fusilli for a grand total of 5 minutes. It was so simple, so rich, so thick, and so meaty that it was filling but at the same time so comforting and slurpable that you really had to go slowly so you didn't end up wishing you'd stopped about 10 minutes ago.

The point is, you should go make your own meat broth and either make or buy some very good pasta. Combine. Enjoy.

Chickpea Chili

When you go to as many farmers' markets as I do, you end up with a whole lot of vegetables, and even I get stumped on what to do with them sometimes. It's not that I don't know how to cook them, but they don't always have to be side-dishes, so finding recipes that combine them in interesting and tasty ways can be more of a challenge. A good challenge. A potentially delicious challenge, and therein lies the fun.

These vegetables are so beautiful that you buy them on a whim, promising yourself you'll use them. But the first beautiful item is replaced by the next beautiful item and another promise. So when I realized I had a few items in my fridge I'd temporarily forgotten about, I chastised myself and went looking for a recipe that would use them to their full potential.

I've lately been boiling all the mountains of green beans I'd purchased in delicious leftover pho' beef or chicken broths for a side dish, but after cooking up a whole bunch of chickpeas, freezing them, and realizing that they were taking up way too much room in my freezer, something had to be done that would combine my beans, zucchini and frozen chickpeas. So I turned to Judith Finlayson's aptly-named slow-cooker cookbook, "Delicious and Dependable," and it sure was. You don't have to make this recipe in a slow-cooker. A big pot on the stove is absolutely fine. Just let it cook for about 30 minutes at a simmer instead of turning on the slow-cooker. Then when you add the corn and zucchini at the end, just 5 minutes of more cooking is fine.

I settled on "Two Bean Chili with Zucchini". I chose it because I had all the ingredients, from the perfect number of dried ancho chilies to the can of tomatoes (San Marzanos) in my cupboard, to the frozen corn kernels also taking up way too much space in my freezer when fresh corn is coming into season, and of course I had all the dried spices. It's rare that a lack of spices is my recipe downfall.

I've had ancho chilies since I made the Santa Fe Sweet Potato Soup recipe from the same book, and it was phenomenal. Since then just the thought of ancho chilies has made me happy, and I think they can do no wrong. I am, unfortunately, not above such wrong-doing. When you use dried chilies you have to soak them in boiling water for about 30 minutes. While you do this you need to make sure the chilies are completely covered by the water. If an end sticks out it'll stay hard and you'll end up chewing your chili pepper. This is very undesirable. So you put a plate on top of the bowl of chilies in boiling water to press the chilies down into the liquid. The problem is you can't really see into the bowl to make sure the chilies are completely covered, and it's not until 30 minutes later when you require the use of your soaked chilies that you realize they're not properly soaked. So be careful. That's about all I can say. Make sure your plate that's keeping the chilies submerged is big enough, but not too big, and the bowl is flat and fairly heavy. You can also try turning the your chilies over in the water after 15 minutes to make sure each side is submerged for at least half the time.

Next, you need to sweat your zucchinis. In Montreal you'd think this would happen naturally...but no, they need to be salted first. Chop your zucchinis into 1/2" lengths (I had no idea what this meant. Cut them lengthwise into 1/2" length and width, making the height the whole length of the zucchini? Length is a very ambiguous term...cut your zucchinis however you please...I like quartering the zucchini length wise, and then chopping along the length of the lengths about 1/2" apart. This is probably about what Judith means, but she doesn't specify to quarter the zucchini first. I didn't think big coins of zucchini would work well in this recipe. I generally think diced vegetables are best for chili but you can get away with less chopping work by blaming Judith's less than clear instructions). So chop them as you see fit, sprinkle them with salt (preferably coarse salt), and place them in a colander. The liquid will drain out of them. After 20 or 30 minutes (whenever it's convenient for you) rinse the salt from the zucchini and pat them dry with paper towel. Rinsing them won't make them soggy again that quickly, so don't worry. You need the liquid out of them to sauté them properly. If you don't sweat them they'll get mushy in the skillet. This way they'll brown up nicely and be more meaty. 

While the zucchini are sweating, chop a bunch of onions and garlic. It really doesn't matter how many. A lot is great. Now you need to wait for your zucchinis to sweat. If you're sweating, not the zucchini, get some ice for yourself and a glass of water. You should not be a puddle by the end of this recipe, and slow-cookers heat up your entire home.

Heat a little oil over medium heat and then add the zucchini. Stir until they brown on all sides. Then move them to a bowl and let them cool before refrigerating. Now sauté the onions and garlic in the leftover oil in the skillet. Let them soften for a good 5 minutes at least. Crunchy onions are no good in this recipe. Then in went the spices: oregano, salt, pepper, and cumin. They got cooked for 1 minute to coat the onions and garlic, and then in went the tomatoes and green beans. I just rinsed the green beans in advance and cut the really long ones, because the recipe said they could be up to 2" long! Like the zucchini I thought this was too big, so you could cut them into 1" lengths, or whatever length you prefer. It's kind of funny, though, struggling to eat long green beans with a spoon.

Now the recipe messed up. Editors, what happened?? I went to all that trouble of soaking the ancho chilies and there is no indication in the recipe of when to add them! Here I am looking around my kitchen thinking I've added everything, when I spot the bowl of chilies. When do they go in? They definitely go in before the slow-cooker gets turned on in the next step. So I shook my head, drained the chilies, removed the seeds, diced them, and added them to the pot (quickly! because I didn't want too much liquid to evaporate).

The tomatoes were coarsely chopped already, so the whole mixture just needed a little stir and it came quickly to a boil. Then into the slow-cooker it went and I mixed in 2 cups of chickpeas. The recipe says romano or pinto, but with beans I'm generally not too fussy. Chickpeas do taste a whole lot different, but they weren't going to taste bad.

Then all that was left was to turn the mixture to high for 4 hours in the slow-cooker. 4 hours of eager anticipation. 20 minutes before dinner I added the 1 1/2 cups of corn kernels and the refrigerated zucchini, and turned the slow cooker to high. The amazing thing about slow-cookers is that even though the colour fades on green vegetables, they stay fairly crisp. The zucchini was still firm (not too much, but just right) and the green beans were a tiny bit crunchy. No mushy, over-cooked vegetables. Hurray! I actually picked through my bowl in search of the zucchini, they were so good. It may also have had to do with the fact they were a little saltier than the other vegetables and beans...maybe. Still, this is a great way to get the best flavour out of your vegetables if you're going to cook them. You could also replace the vegetables with other things, like carrots, celery, or peas. With chili, the world is your oyster. Maybe don't add oysters...though worchestershire sauce is a good call because of the tamarind. I have no idea why oysters made me think of worchestershire sauce...hmm...I wonder what oyster sauce would be like...

Plateau Farmer's Market

I'm very picky when it comes to Farmer's Markets, but it is summer, and I've been making the rounds.

Tuesday is Organic Campus at McGill
Thursday is the Mile End Market or the Coop La Maison Verte on Sherbrooke in NDG
Saturday is Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue (only went once since it's far) or St-Henri or Little Burgundy Market
Sunday is the Plateau Market (but starting this week it's also the Outremont market) and I generally also get to Jean-Talon on Sundays on my way to the Plateau.

Sundays are my favourite for one reason: the muffins and bread at the Plateau Market from "La Perle et Son Boulanger" (adorable name: "The pearl and her baker", or more likely "Someone whose last name is Laperle and his or her baker". The raspberry blueberry muffin is incredible. the fruit are fresh, not frozen, and they make the whole muffin juicy. They also actually taste like something. The muffin itself is so moist and flavourful. I swear this guy has amazing flour. Two weeks ago was the first time I bought the bread. Now I've been making my own gluten-free bread lately and figured bread was not high on my list of things to buy, but they only have food there (lunch-style food like the fresh gazpacho I had once) sometimes, and I was hungry and a loaf of chocolate cranberry (bread, not loaf, really, since there was no sugar and it a simple loaf with small pieces of bittersweet chocolate and dried cranberries) was very tempting. Oh wow, was it good. I think there might be a little bit of sourdough in all the breads, because even though it wasn't a sourdough loaf, it had that slightly fermented taste to which I'm completely addicted. The chocolate wasn't anything special in terms of taste, but it was soft and a little warm in the Montreal heat when I bought it, and the cranberries got plump and juicy.

So I went back last week looking for another loaf. They were sold out, so I bought a loaf of hazelnut, along with a muffin and a chocolatine (pain au chocolate or chocolate in pastry, for all you non-Quebers). No I did not eat all them at once. I'm big on tasting. The bread was absolutely amazing. It's the perfect bread for dips (I just blended some chickpeas and some steamed turnip greens. The bitterness of turnip greens and the nuttiness of the cooked chickpeas worked really nicely with the bitterness of the fermentation and the hazelnuts), but only when fresh. The next day it's about half as good, and the day after that, even less. It dries out fast since it's so fresh, so I think I need to start wrapping it in a tea towel and then in a bag to keep it fresher.

The muffin was ridiculously good, and I wasn't even really attracted to the pain au chocolate, which looked a little squished. After trying the chocolate in the bread I wasn't expecting much, but I was so very wrong. There was so much butter in the pastry that I could have died of French heaven on the spot. The chocolate was again a little gooey, but this time it was semi-sweet chocolate, and so when it combined with the butter...

Thank goodness I'm lactose-intolerant or I would have eaten it all. The knowledge that I'm going to get really sick if I keep going is usually enough to stop me mid-pastry. Still, I'll be back for more bread next week. They've turned me into a loyal customer through addiction. Good work.

Cookies, the 2nd (How Do You Mess Up Oatmeal Cookies?)

You don't. Sometimes they work out perfectly and, well, sometimes they don't. These didn't, but it was all my fault. They don't look so bad, right? They didn't taste bad either, but they didn't taste like rich, buttery, chewy deliciousness either. That was kind of what I was going for.

What I did wrong:
1. I used mostly Earth Balance (a vegan margarine) instead of butter and I topped up the measuring cup with oil so that the cookies would be dairy-free, but I forgot how bland both of these things are, and un-butter-like
2. I used a gluten-free flour blend instead of all-purpose white flour, so the cookies spread out very thinly on the baking sheet instead of rising a little.
3. I placed the cookies too close together on the baking sheet, so they spread into each other and into a giant, but thin, cookie rectangle. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it makes the cookies look more like logs or slices than cookies when you try to figure out how to remove them from the pan.

Ingredients:
1/2 butter (I should have just used butter or a flavourful margarine. Anything is better than earth balance it seems. I just got a new vegan cookbook and all the desserts are made with oil. I'm so very much not excited)
1 cup minus a tbsp white sugar
1 tbsp molasses (you can also just use 1/2 cup white sugar and 1/2 cup brown sugar. It's the same thing)
2 egg whites
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup gluten free flour blend (I should maybe have used 1/2 cup all-purpose flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat, like the original recipe suggested, but my gluten-free flour blend is supposed to replace all-purpose and 1 cup of all-purpose would in theory be better than 1/2 cup all-purpose and 1/2 cup whole wheat)
1 1/4 cups large-flake rolled oats, blended (ground) into a flour (this is the same thing as oat flour, but you're much more likely to have rolled oats lying around than ground oat flour. It'll also be fresher this way. You could just leave the rolled oats large but it's a completely different texture and having done both, I think the grinding method tastes and works better)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup dried cherries or raisins, optional (I skipped this because I just wanted plain oatmeal cookies. Savoury, not sweet)
1/2 cup grated chocolate, optional (I would only have used 1 oz if I used this, but again, I didn't feel like it. Besides I already had the chocolate in my biscotti)

Nothing fancy to this recipe, which may also be why the cookies spread on the baking sheet instead of staying in their cookie mounds.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beat the margarine and sugars in a large bowl until light, about 2-3 minutes. Maybe I skimped on this step? Beat in the egg whites and vanilla. Doesn't say how long. At this point I'm missing Alice Medrich. She would have specified...well, in at least one of her recipes she would have specified and then you'd be expected to use that recipe as a guide for all other cookie recipes because God forbid she copy and paste...

In a slightly smaller bowl combine the flour, ground oats (I just used my blender to grind them. It worked great), baking powder and soda. Whisk to combine (stirring is also fine, apparently). Now stir the flour mixture into the creamed margarine mixture until combined. Then optionally stir in the dried fruit and/or chocolate.

Drop batter (or shape artistically - in mounds...not exactly Da Vinci) by the tbsp (approximately. Who actually gets out a tablespoon to measure how big the cookies are?) onto parchment-lined baking sheets. The parchment is just so you don't have to use butter to grease the pan. You can also use aluminum foil, or God forbid, cooking spray. If you think cooking spray is your best option I vote that greasing with butter will add calories and fat, but you'll be better off this way than with the chemicals in the aerosol spray can.

I used just one cookie sheet and a small tray for the toaster oven but I definitely should have done two batches. They only bake for 12-14 minutes so I should have just been patient. The recipe is supposed to make 32 cookies and 13 cookies per pan is standard. So AT LEAST two cookie sheets. I guess that's why my cookies oozed into each other. Still, they were absolutely delicious when fresh out of the oven - fresh and soft and a little gooey, but still chewy from the ground oats. I couldn't taste the butter, which was a little sad, but when your mouth is full of fresh cookie you won't complain.

How to save a pan of spread cookies: The thing about creating a pan of cookies is that it's hard to remove them from the pan if they've spread into each other. I'm big on geometric shapes, but I don't exactly have any spatulas that are good at creating circular cookies from a rectangular pan. This is called a cookie-cutter, I know, but then you waste all that cookie i between the piece, and you don't get the nice finished edge. You basically need to cut the cookie like a piece of cake into squares. It's not that attractive and the mixture's a bit crumbly. So wait until it's cooled but not stiff (20 minutes, approximately) and then carefully slice through the pieces in whatever shapes you want. My cookies didn't have to be pretty, but I ended up re-cutting them later once they had hardened up a bit and at that point it was too late. They were a little bit brittle and crumbly. I hate wasting cookies and I hate jagged edges so I had to eat the crumbly bits. Not the worst thing in the world, but also a bit of a waste. Normally I would never say that but it would have been WAY too unhealthy for me to eat all the crumbly bits and so there are all these little leftover pieces that I can't really serve anyone else. The point is, when you make a new cookie recipe, make some small cookies on the baking sheet and some larger ones. That way if the cookies spread at least the small ones will be fine and pretty. Then you'll know for next time how large you can make them. Pencils were created for a reason - make notes in your recipe book to remind yourself next time of what to do. The definition of insanity...

Because I Can Never Decide Which Cookies To Make: Chocolate Studded Almond Biscotti and Oatmeal Cookies

I've been eating too many fresh fruits and vegetables. I feel like I've been on a diet of soft foods. Sure, they're delicious and fresh and I know I'm doing good things for my body by eating them, but my teeth need more work! I need strong flavour! So I knew I wanted to make biscotti. That way I could finish a meal with a satisfying crackle and crunch. I don't drink coffee but I knew that dipped in plain, bitter yogurt the sweetness of the biscotti would marry well with the tang, especially when made with bittersweet chocolate. I didn't want a lot of sugar, but I wanted a mildly sweet treat.

Okay, fine, so that's decided, I thought.

Nope, I also saw a recipe for oatmeal cookies and I'd been dreaming of soft chewy cookies for awhile. I wanted the chew of oatmeal and the density, not the air of plain chocolate chip cookies. I didn't want any fruit messing with the flavour. All I needed was a plain oatmeal cookie.

So I made both. It's been so long since I've baked, and it's so good for the soul. There's nothing like a fresh cookie to make looking for a roommate better. You probably don't believe me. I counted today; I've lived with 28 people in the last 6 years. 3 men, 25 women. I've had enough roommates. My next roommate will be #29, and if I make it to 30 I'll feel much older in terms of living experiences than the number. Perhaps I'll have an early midlife roommate crisis. Perhaps I'm already having one.

This is why I needed to spend a few hours baking in my kitchen. Emotional therapy.

These are amazing biscotti. They're from my favourite chocolate book, Alice Medrich's "Chocolate and Art of Low-Fat Desserts". My mother bought an extra used copy online (it's discontinued) just so that I don't have to lug it home in my suitcase whenever I go home. That's how much I love this book. It includes everything from ridiculous buches de Noel, 5 different mousses, cakes, creams to petite sweets - quarter-sized cookies, meringues and haystacks. There is, of course, an exceptional biscotti recipe. There are, in fact, three, and I sort of combined the first two to create my perfect snack.

Chocolate Spiked Biscotti:
2 cups flour (I used my gluten-free flour blend, which worked perfectly in these and less perfectly in the oatmeal cookies I made later)
1 tsp baking soda
1 square of bittersweet baking chocolate, grated
1/4 tsp salt (I feel like I added too much, because my cookies taste way too deliciously salty. It could just be that I used fleur de sel so the little salt rocks explode in the bites where my teeth find them)
2 eggs
3/4 cup cane sugar
1 tbsp molasses (the recipe calles for about 1/2 a cup of white sugar and 1/2 of dark, but white sugar just has more of the nutrients from molasses - the brown in brown sugar - taken out of it, so it's an easy fix)
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup ground toasted, blanched almonds (Oh, for more info on toasting nuts, check my bittersweet chocolate truffle hazelnut mousse torte recipe)

I think because I used fleur de sel and cane sugar the biscotti turned out grainier than expected, but it was actually so perfect since they helped the crunch. I love it. Dipping these in coffee to soften them would be a sin. Well,in a few days when they're a bit more rock hard it may be a necessity, but freshly hardened, they're perfect.

I whisked the flour, salt, baking soda and grated chocolate. Grating the chocolate was annoying, since I grated it very finely. What was good about it, though, was that it was so difficult I decided to only do one square of it instead of two, keeping the fat down. It was just chocolate-y enough, especially when eaten right after an oatmeal cookie. Actually, then it seemed VERY chocolate-y. You could also coarsely chop the chocolate but then it doesn't go as far. You don't get chocolate in every bite. So there's a balance.

In a large mixing bowl I then beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla. None of this "3 minutes until pale" business. Medrich gets right down to it and just says "util combined". Apparently biscotti aren't so fussy. You're not going for perfect cake texture. They're intentionally supposed to be tough. These are hardy cookies. No frills, just exceptional flavour. Then I stirred in the flour until combined (you can also beat, if you don't mind flour flying everywhere), and then added the nuts. Stir, stir, stir. Actually, I more so folded with a whisk, but as long as it gets combined it'll be just fine.

I preheated the oven to 300 Fahrenheit and lined my cookie tray with aluminum foil. Then I shaped the cookie dough into three long logs on the tray. They're supposed to go lengthwise and stay about 2 1/2 inches apart, but my cookie sheet isn't big enough for that. I figured it didn't really matter because these didn't have to be gorgeous cookies, and if they flowed into each other, well, I could live with that. I can live with a lot of things. A bad roommate is not one of them.

So these long logs are kind of like freshly planted gardens. Spiked with chocolate and almonds and in 35 minutes they'll come out of the oven as fully-grown cookies. That's where the fun starts. Biscotti means "twice-baked" in Italian. It also just means "cookie", since this is generally what they eat as a cookie. Not so much into the oatmeal raisin thing. This is only the first baking stage. Some vegetables and planted things can be eaten raw, but many need to be cooked, or re-baked, like these biscotti. I did eat one after 35 minutes to see what they were like, and they were very much like a cookie, but not quite yet like the crunch I was craving.

So the logs came off the aluminum foil, got cooled for 10 minutes, got carefully sliced back apart (they had baked into each other a little, but not irreparably so), and got sliced into 1/2 inch slices.

This is where Medrich assumes you read all her biscotti recipes before making one. I've made biscotti before, and generally you slice them on the diagonal to make the pieces longer. The biscotti you see in coffee shops are ridiculously long and are the equivalent of 3 biscotti, but even so, these biscotti become prettier when cut diagonally. One of her biscotti recipes says to cut on the diagonal and the other doesn't. I was surprised not to see it in the first, and didn't check the second. It really doesn't make a big difference, besides an aesthetic one. Now it also says to place the cookies on the oven rack. I did a double take. Put the cookies directly on the oven racks? Well it didn't say "directly", but the next line said "or arrange slices on two baking sheets" and bake them for half the time, rotate, flip front to back, top to bottom, fuss, fuss, fuss. So I figured I'd go with the less fuss step of baking directly on the oven rack. By the way, the rack should be on the bottom of the oven. I put it on the second bottom rung because the very bottom seemed bizarre. Actually one of the recipes didn't even specify where the rack should be. In the other recipe it did say explicitly to put the cookies "directly" on the oven rack. I don't know why publishers don't employ the copy and paste function of their computers when it would help a poor baker out.

Anyway, on the racks the slices went, carefully placed one by one. The oven was still "on" and hot, so I did this all very carefully. It's not great for the back. I miraculously didn't burn myself. 20 minutes later the cookies were carefully removed from the oven one by one. Medrich gives a trick (in one recipe only, of course) to take one cookie out when the timer goes and leave the rest in for another minute or 2. Once the removed cookie is cooled you can test it. If it's crunchy enough then you can take all the cookies out. If not, leave them all in there for another few minutes. Repeat test procedure. This can get dangerous, for both the tongue and waistline. Don't rush the testing or you'll burn your mouth, and call it quits when the sugar rush kicks in. It shouldn't go longer than 5 minutes, this whole "extra baking time" business.

Now the important thing is to cool the cookies completely before storing. If they get stored while they're still hot they'll soften up. NOTE! THERE IS NO BUTTER IN THESE COOKIES!!! and because they're so dry, they last for WEEKS at room temperature in a sealed container. I also just noticed that Alice and I agree on alternatives serving methods for the cookies. She thinks a scoop of yogurt is a lovely idea (though she specifies a "really pretty coffee cup" for presentation. Apparently yogurt is nothing special on its own. She is not French or Greek, it seems. She also think coffee should get poured around the yogurt. I agree with her that it's a great topping for frozen yogurt or non-fruity gelato, but one idea I didn't foresee was crushing them and pressing them against the sides of a cheesecake or iced cake (the iced cake is my addition, what we the fact that I don't eat a whole lot of cheesecake). Alice, we're a good team, you and I. You probably already have a roommate, right?

I Swear It's Better Than It Looks: Boiled Eggplant Sautéd In Lamb Fat

Remember how I love eggplant? There's something absolutely delicious about how slimy it can be. It becomes soft and mushy and very mild. Different kinds, especially the long, thinner purple Asian ones, aren't as bitter as the regular pear-shaped ones. Slimmer is not always better, but it seems that in this metaphor the larger ones are bitter about their bottoms.

All joking aside, there was still a fair bit of lamb fat in the skillet after sauté-ing my potatoes, and I hate letting things that great go to waste. So I decided to sauté the eggplant that I'd boiled whole (got the idea from a Vietnamese recipe blog when researching pho) in what was left of the fat. Well the eggplant sure sucked up the leftovers! It actually started to burn. So that's why Indian and Chinese eggplant dishes are so luscious...they need a ridiculous amount of oil or fat to keep the eggplant from sticking to the wok or pot!

The result? The eggplant was bland, even with the oil. Only the texture was different, becoming a bit more slimy (which I actually like. Maybe it's an acquired taste, like oysters) with the additional oil. I did a comparison with some un-sautéd, boiled eggplant to be sure. So what I ended up doing was adding a bit of chaat masala for flavour. It was a cheat baigan bharta, but the mango powder ended up being delicious and there was more than enough salt in the masala to bring out the flavour. Now I have leftover eggplant for amazing sandwiches. I'll just sprinkle on a bit of chaat masala, add a few more vegetables and some puréed chickpeas, and die happy.