baba ghanouj, also known as mtabal

Every great chef [as well as every mediocre home cook] has a signature dish.

Baba Ghanouj is mine.

I learned how to make it properly from my Aunt Nada, who chars the eggplant directly on the stovetop. Made this way, Baba Ghanouj is messy, messy. The eggplant drains brown juice all over the stovetop, and the blackend skin sticks to everything. I was obsessed with baba ghanouj and french fry pita wraps for most of 2006, and the last day in our apartment on Baltimore Ave, I was scraping hardened, black bits of eggplant off the backsplash so we could get our security deposit back.

But oven roasting, while much neater, will fail to give that ultra smoky flavor that even avowed eggplant haters embrace. Mtabal, as it is typically called in the Arab world, has wide appeal, and is ideal for picnics and potlucks.

I made some last weekend, when Ann and I successfully held our first joint social gathering, a picnic in Cobbs Creek welcoming the first days of spring. My sister and I have lived together in Philadelphia for 3 years, and in that time, nothing has proven more difficult than merging our social groups and taste in appetizers. We've been planning our housewarming party since 2006, with the last attempt ending in a fight over Swedish Meatballs.

The picnic was fun, and the baba was a hit, as always. It appeals to my bohemian hipster crowd and Ann's art school rock star buds.






I'll be moving come summertime, this time without little Annie bug, and as excited as I am to embark on a new adventure, I will miss sharing sandwiches with her.

Baba Gannouj

2 large Italian eggplants, charred until black on a stovetop

1 ½ cloves garlic, mashed or chopped

¼ cup lemon

½ cup tahini

Salt to taste

Char eggplant directly on a medium flame, or grill on a gas or charcoal grill until it is soft and pulpy. When it is totally flaccid, take the eggplants off the stove and run them under cold water, removing all the burnt skin. Careful not to burn yourself!

Mash eggplants with a fork until it is soft. Add tahini, garlic, lemon and salt, and continue to mash until it is basically pureed. A mortar works well for this task.

Served garnished with olives and parsley.

sweet squash couscous with brown butter

not my picture. Thanks Creative Commons!

I was reminded today of a particularly desperate time in my personal gastro-chronology by a friend who, having just returned from Morocco, had perfectly nothing good to say about couscous.

I balked for a moment when she told me, having just recently rediscovered my love for the tiny bits of grain. But then remembered that I ate the stuff every single day for close to a year my first year of college, and I was pretty over it after repeat doses.

Freshman year was a tough one. I have these repressed memories of my dad loading 3 cases of "Near East" individual serving-size boxes into the back of his Volkswagon. We'd make our way up I-75, from Cincinnati to Dayton, and I would pray to "Cheese-us" that we would get into a terrible accident and I would be spared from lonley nights eating microwaved couscous with it's mysterious green-flecked "seasoning"and watching 10 Things I Hate About You for the fortieth time.

Sophomore year I wisened up, got a credit card and a boyfriend, and we stuffed our faces at every indian buffet in Southwest Ohio. And now that I'm on the other side of massive credit defaults, I'm tempted to say it was worth it. Couscous has been restored to a perfectly delightful, quick and frugal way to enjoy a Sunday.

This dish requires a lot of pans and a good bit of time, most of which, however, is patiently waiting for the squash to cook and the onions to caramelize. I wrote some postcards to friends in the meantime. The payoff comes in quantity...you could make this for 40 people or 40 lunches pretty easily.

sweet squash couscous with brown butter

3 cups couscous
1 bunch spinach, washed and chopped
1 butternut squash, cooked and cubed
1.5 onions
handful of chopped walnuts
handful of golden raisins
bit of brown sugar
salt

First, put the squash in the oven and allow to bake for about 45 minutes. Take .5 of an onion and chop it into strips. Carmalize in a pan on low heat for about 30-45 minutes. Chop the rest of the onion small, and fry until translucent in a large pan. Add couscous, water, and steam until tender. In another pan, sautee spinach. When the onions are almost done carmalizing, toss in the raisins and walnuts and top with brown sugar, allowing all the ingredients to get kind of bubbling and clustery.

Brown butter in a pan until it is golden and smells nutty. Mix all ingredients in a large pot, including cubed squash, with the heat on low, toss with the brown butter.

Sesame Tea Biscuits

Regular readers of this blog know that I am not a terribly accomplished baker.

I prefer to think of recipes as a guide, a series of suggestions that one may or may not choose to follow. In cooking, this approach yields mixed results. I suffer through some disasters, but most my inventions turn out alright, or at least salvageable.

However, the "Jackson Pollock" approach is not well suited for baking.

Take, for example, the pistachio madelines attempted at Christmas. I didn't have madeline molds, so I used a cookie sheet. I didn't have baking powder, so I used baking soda and 3 spoons of greek yogurt. And instead of sticking to the pistachio meal and sugar like christmascookie.com insisted, I heaped in lemon zest, nutmeg and a splish splash of rose water, so much, in fact, that my poor father's kitchen smelled like a syrian baklava factory.

The end result was a single merged sheet of cratered green sponge cake that tasted strangely akin to sour patch kids, those movie theater gummies that burn your mouth with citric acid and red 40.

I tried to ruin these sesame tea biscuits. I really did. I almost used whole wheat flour [hard as rocks and impossible to chew]. I almost substituted the sugar for an anise-infused simple syrup [sticky and cloying]. I almost used tahini instead of butter [heaavvvyy].

But these were a housewarming present for some friends and I couldn't risk a cookie catastrophe. I looked up every sesame cookie recipe I could find, weighed the options, and chose a simple, no-fuss, Italian recipe. I followed it almost exactly. And the results were quite successful!

These were a lot of fun to make, and I think they look adorable. They are exactly what I wanted, not too sweet, not quite as crispy as biscotti, but stand up to a dunk in a cuppa tea.

Sesame Tea Biscuits
Adapted ever so slightly from Paula Laurita

1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla
3 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup milk
flour for kneading dough
oil for cookie sheets

Mix the flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl, Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl. Add the eggs and vanilla to the sugar-butter and mix well until fluffy. Add the flour 1/2 cup at a time to the egg-butter mixture. Mix well after each addition.

Place the dough on a floured surface and knead until smooth. Take small amounts of dough (about 1 Tbs) and shape into little loaves. Dip each cookie loaf into the milk and then roll in sesame seeds until well coated. Place on oiled cookie sheet and bake at 350F for 15 minutes or until browned. Remove from the tray and allow to cool.

Cooking Co-ops

I've been resistant to post about Lunch Club on this blog, which is odd, considering Lunch Club is the primary outlet where food obsession manifests. Lunch Club is genius; I cook lunch for 4 friends on Sunday nights, and deliver it to their doorstep for Monday morning. Then, each friend makes lunch on their assigned evening and delivers it for the next days lunch. It's cheap, healthy, and perhaps most importantly, a laid-back, no-pressure approach to a cooking co-op.

I am afraid that making too much noise about Lunch Club will disturb its magical, harmonic simplicity. It's worked for over a year, I think mostly because we've been very relaxed about it. It is so tempting to turn it into more than what it is. I love food, and I spend a lot of time working toward a society that is community-based and mutually supportive. So of course, the logical conclusion is that Lunch Club is the revolution and I should probably write a book about it and start a non-profit that will replicate the model large-scale in at least 9 major metropolitan areas. Right?

Well, no, and besides, someone already beat me to the punch.

This book on dinner cooperatives has sparked some chatter on The Ethicurean and Bitten at the NYT.

The book is about starting a dinner co-op that sounds a lot like Lunch Club. A dinner co-op would be infinitely more complicated than lunch, particularly if you are feeding a family. Maybe you really would need to buy 88 pyrex pans in order to make it work. But the checklists, spreadsheets and trust-building exercises seem like its over-thinking it.

An ideal co-op is flexible and forgiving [say, if you decide to invent a recipe involving aduki beans and two different kinds of beer, or if your pizza dough turns out so tough that you have to maul it with your molars to eat it.] It's cool, baby. There is always lunch cart cheese sandwiches for a buck fifty. No big whoop.

Mark Bittman is pretty cynical about the feasibility of cooking co-ops. Like Bittman, I too have been subject to the failed collective house cooking arrangements and gluten-free, vegan potlucks with 6 different kinds of spelt muffins [living in West Philly is a little like living in Berkley in the 70's]. But Lunch Club has made me into a believer, with the caveat that cooking co-ops should be low-key and fun, and should lessen the stress in your life, not increase it.

Lentil Firecrackers

Back to blogging with a bang! 

Note: These are not actually my firecrackers, because I stupidly did not take a picture. But these are pretty much what they looked like, thanks to Harris Gaber and the flickr creative commons license.        

These lovely lentil dumplings were inspired, both in name and flavah by the excellent Rangoon Burmese restaurant in Philly's Chinatown.  It has probably been a year since I've eaten there, but they were remarkable. So remarkable, in fact, that I had one of those socially-awkward foodie moments, where I had every intention of making witty and intelligent dinner conversation with Ann's out of town guests, but spent the entire time talking about how impressed I was that the appetizers were simultaneously crispy and chewy. I really did want to be able to add in some hilarious and insightful comment about the legitimacy of 9-11 conspiracies, but was reduced to "mmmmmm....fried bean mush". 

I'm committed to using up the odd assortment of legumes and grains that I have apparently stockpiled in my apartment for nuclear winter, so when I had to think of something to do with my 10 lbs of red lentils other than make mjeddera, some sort of lentil dumpling or samosa creation came to mind immediately. While Rangoon's firecrackers are more like samosas, my hesitancy to deep fry had me thinking that a pan friend wonton purse might provide the perfect home for a simple but tasty red lentil pottage. 

I'm slowly developing a list of healthy-ish food items that can be assembled ahead of time and frozen for quick weeknight meals when I literally have 15 minutes to eat before I run to one meeting or another. These fit the bill perfectly! Which is good, because the only other thing I could think of was burritos, and was feeling discouraged by my lack of imagination. Leave ideas for me in the comments! 

Lentil Firecrackers

4 cups red lentils

1 c. coconut milk 

1 bunch scallions, chopped 

1 bunch cilantro 

3 cloves garlic, chopped

hot pepper to taste [cayanne or jamaican red] 

curry powder

cumin 

salt pepper

wonton wrappers

canola or grape seed oil for frying

Boil lentils in water until soft. While they are cooking, saute garlic, then onion and cilantro in a pretty big pan or wok and sweat with spices. When lentils are done, add them to the pan,  pour in coconut milk, give it a stir and let simmer until it is a thick porridge. Taste it, see if it needs more of a kick, then add more spices as necessary.  

Put about 1 tablespoon in each wrapper and fold over, sealing with a flour and water paste. Pan fry in about 1/4 inch of hot oil.