Melanzane al funghetto

This is an eggplant dish from the town of Bari, in Southern Italy. I was introduced to it when a friend of mine from Bari brought it to a dinner party, and in fact it's a great dish to bring to a party because it's extremely easy to make, and it is best if you let it sit for several hours before serving it, so you can prepare it in advance - even a day before you plan to eat it. And of course, it tastes wonderful!


Ingredients:
1 large eggplant
2 or 3 ripe tomatoes
Large green olives
Capers
A clove of garlic
Fresh basil
Fresh parsley
Oregano
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

Wash the eggplant, and peel the skin in strips so that some is left on. Cut the eggplant into disks a few centimeters thick, and then cut those discs into squares. Crush the garlic and then chop it up. In a large pan, heat some olive oil and then add the garlic. After 15-20 seconds, add the eggplant, stirring quite often. If necessary, add a bit more olive oil, but don't add too much or else the eggplant will get too soft.

Wash the tomatoes and cut them into cubes, then add them to the eggplants (which should have cooked on their own for about 5 minutes). Then wash the olives and capers and add them in as well. Wash the basil and parsley and chop them finely. Add the basil, parsley, and oregano, and sprinkle everything with salt and pepper. After a few minutes, turn the heat down to low, and let everything cook another 15 or 20 minutes, stirring every so often, until the eggplants are soft but not mushy.


Let cool, and serve at room temperature, or else refrigerate and serve after several hours.

Baba Ghanoush

I just got back from a short trip (to Rome... sigh), and since the farmer's markets are only on weekends here and I arrived in the middle of the week, my mother was kind enough to load me down with all sorts of vegetables upon my arrival, including two lovely little eggplants. I'd been meaning to make baba ghanoush for awhile, so this weekend seemed like a good time to try.


Baba ghanoush is a Middle Eastern spread, pretty similar to Hummus, except you use eggplants instead of chickpeas. It's usually served cold, as an appetizer, but since I made mine fresh it was still warm from the roasted eggplants, and it was really good! I didn't make enough to have any left over, but if you refrigerate it for a day or so it probably tastes just as good, if not better.

You will need:
2 small or 1 medium eggplant
A large spoonful of tahini
Juice of half a lemon
Some fresh parsley
Salt
Pepper

Preheat the oven to about 355º F/180º C. While it's preheating, wash and dry the eggplant(s), tear off any large leaves at the top, and poke holes in the skins with a fork. When the oven is hot, place the eggplants on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil and put them in the oven. Let them bake about 30 minutes or so, turning them every so often so that they bake evenly.

When the skin of the eggplants is all black and wrinkly, take them out of the oven and let them cool for about 15 minutes. While they are cooling, rinse and chop up the parsley.

Once the eggplants are cool enough to handle, remove the skins and place the inside (pulp? innards?) on a cutting board. Chop up the eggplant into smallish chunks. Though you could also mash the eggplant or use a food processor, leaving the eggplant in chunks gives the whole thing a more rough-hewn, fresh from the fields (do eggplants grow in fields? probably not) sort of look.

Mix up the eggplants with the tahini, lemon juice, and parsley, and sprinkle everything with salt and pepper. Serve immediately with bread/crackers/grain-based food of your choice or else refrigerate and eat later.

Patlıcan Beğendi (Creamy Eggplant Purée)

Patlıcan Beğendi is a Turkish dish and the name translates roughly as "The eggplant pleased (someone)", and if you make this, I can assure you that the eggplant will certainly please you (patlıcan beğeneceksin for you language buffs, and note that the 'ğ' is not really pronounced, so it's more like 'beyendi' or 'beyenejeksin' depending on what you want to say)!


This dish was the first meal I had in Turkey, and I don't think I'll ever forget those first few bites! I had been backpacking all over Europe for four weeks with three friends - two Turkish, and one other American - and we had arranged to spend the last 5 days of the trip in the Turkish girls' native city of Istanbul.

While all backpacking trips involve a good deal of 'roughing it', the journey to Istanbul was a particularly difficult stretch. It took us a full two days starting from Venice in the morning, taking the train to the Italian port of Ancona, then a 19-hour ferry ride to Patras in Greece, sweaty crowded trains all along the coast of Greece up to Thessaloniki, where we spent a mostly sleepless night on the street outside the train station (they closed for cleaning from 2:30 to 5 am), and another long train ride to Istanbul, with some highly suspicious stops at the border in between.

As you can imagine, by the evening when we finally made it to Istanbul, we were filthy, exhausted and pretty darn hungry, having eaten little but train station sandwiches for the past few days. When we walked into the friend's apartment where we would be staying, it was like re-entering a long-forgotten world - oh yes, people do live in houses. Houses with showers! Beds! Private bathrooms! And of course, home-cooked meals!

After we had showered off all the Grecian, Italian, and Turkish dirt that had steadily been collecting on us and all our things, we entered the kitchen, where the friend's housekeeper/cook/one-time nanny had prepared this dish for us.

Now eggplant, like spinach, is a food I almost never ate back home in the U.S. Personally, I think a large part of the reason for eggplant's relative unpopularity here is it's name - who wants to eat something called an eggplant? Patlıcan (pronounced more like patluhjan), or Italian melanzana or the French (and British) aubergine are all much more attractive words!

However, my friend said this was her absolute favorite dish, and it smelled wonderful, so we eagerly dug in. And of course, she was right - this dish is amazing, especially when you've been living off of sandwiches for several weeks. It's wonderfully filling and warm and tasty - just the sort of thing that should be served to travellers who haven't been inside a home in ages. This dish was thus the beginning of the eggplant-eating section of my life, which I hope will continue for many many more years!

In any case, I hadn't actually thought about this dish in quite some time, but I bought some eggplants this past weekend planning to make some baba ghanoush with them, but then I went and made hummus, which is so similar that the prospect of baba ghanoush just wasn't exciting me, when I suddenly remembered this dish. A quick internet search for terms like "Turkish eggplant cream" quickly brought me to this recipe, in various forms, and I began to check those out.

I even went to some Turkish sites and painstakingly attempted to translate them to make sure I would do things correctly (I once knew some Turkish and I like to be as authentic as possible). In the end I came up with the following recipe, which I guarantee will please, delight, and otherwise satisfy your gustatory senses.

You will need:
2 medium-sized eggplants
A largish pat of butter
50 g flour* (I used whole wheat which I think helps add flavor and richness)
A medium-sized glass of milk (I used whey from a previous ricotta-making endeavor)
Salt
Pepper
50 g Parmesan (the Turkish recipes call for kaşar peyniri which is apparently a sort of yellowish, sheep's milk cheese. Not having any of this on hand, I opted for parmesan, which was suggested by many of the recipes in English)

Some recipes also call for the juice of one lemon, which you submerge the eggplant in after roasting, but I skipped this. I did garnish the dish with some tomatoes, and the acidity went well with the creaminess of the beğendi, so I imagine the lemon juice would be good as well.

*The Turkish recipes called for one coffee cup of flour. Of course, Turkish coffee cups are much much smaller than American coffee cups - if you think of an espresso cups' worth, that's probably about right.

Preheat your oven to about 200º C/400º F. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil, then wash and dry the eggplants. Prick some holes in their skin with a fork to prevent them from exploding in the oven, and place them on the baking sheet. When the oven is hot, put in the eggplants and let bake for about 40 minutes, turning them every so often with tongs or some such implement to be sure they bake evenly.

Once the skin of the eggplants is all black and crackly, take them out of the oven, wrap them tightly in aluminum foil and let them sit about 15 minutes to concentrate the juices. After the 15 minutes are up, unwrap and let cool.


Once the eggplants are cool enough to handle, remove the skins, holding the eggplants over a bowl so that you can catch all their juices, and let the eggplant flesh fall into the bowl. Mash up all the flesh to a nice creamy mush.

Heat the butter in a pot over the stove until it melts. Once it melts, add the flour, and stir. When the flour is goldeny, add in the milk (or whey), a little bit at a time, stirring continuously. After you've added all the milk, mix in the eggplants, then throw in the salt and pepper. Let everything cook about 5 more minutes, stirring from time to time, and then add the parmesan. Let cook one minute more, spoon into a plate and serve warm!


There is also a version of this called Hünkar Beğendi, which basically means "It pleased the Sultan" and involves adding meat. Not being a sultan, I was pleased enough with my humble eggplants, and a small garnishing of tomatoes, but if you like a bit of meat with your eggplant, I recommend looking it up!