Baba ghanouj

I have an aversion to eggplant yet it seems that every where you turn cooks are using eggplant and gardeners are bending over backwards to grow the things. There has to be a reason why this uninspiring, bland vegetable is used so much. One thing I've always enjoyed is store-bought baba ghanouj. Yet like all things store-bought, I have a fervent belief that homemade will always be better. Either as a dip for fresh vegetables or spread out on toasted pita bread, baba ghanouj is great. But I'm also using it as just another condiment. I can use it in a sandwich along with some hummus and vegetables or as a sort of sauce in which to dip some barbecued chicken or fish. I like having a little assortment of all these types of sauces as well as some homemade pickles. There's nothing chemical, nothing mysterious about the stuff that are in these mason jars scattered in the insides of my fridge.

Here's a modified version of a recipe I found for baba ghanouj online. I used twice the amount of lemon juice that the original recipe prescribes as well as added a few spices.

1 eggplant
Juice and zest of 2 lemons
1/4 cup tahini
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
2 cloves garlic, minced
Dash of ground cumin and cayenne
salt and pepper to taste
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Lightly grease a baking sheet.

2. Place eggplant on baking sheet, and make holes in the skin with a fork. Roast it for 30 to 40 minutes, turning occasionally, or until soft. Remove from oven, let cool and peel skin off.

3. Place eggplant and all the ingredients into a food processor and blitz. Chill before serving.

New Apartment, New Soup Diet

To make a long story short, we moved into the apartment building we never should have bought to make our lives easier, put it up for sale, and have only been able to get back in the kitchen in the last few days. There's 3 feet of snow outside (the above photo is about 2 months old) and I'm walking distance to work. Life is alright now. Backed up into a corner but alright.

On the food front, we've decided to go on a soup diet...and by diet I just mean what we're eating and not the weight watching obsession of the 21th century. Every night we make a different soup from the cookbook 400 Best-Ever Soup by Hermes House publishing. We then rate and date them that way we're actually getting some use out of our cookbook, are better able to track our progress through it and are making lighter meals that don't sit in our gut till midnight. All in all, it's a fantastic way to eat. More for breakfast and lunch, less for supper. And, of course, everything except the stock itself is from scratch.

The first soup we made in our soup diet wasn't very good...a 2.5 out of 5. You see, I don't like eggplant. I've tried it time and time again but that big purple bulbous plant just doesn't do it for me. However, I thought I'd swing another kick at a dead horse and tried the Greek Aubergine and Courgette Soup. I thought to myself, "What could go wrong with roasted vegetables in a Greek inspired stock with a fresh dollop of tzatziki in the middle?" The answer: three watery vegetables - eggplant, zucchini, and cucumber - and a taste that just doesn't inspire a wow. The only good thing about this recipe is that I find putting tzatziki in a soup is a great take on the usual dollop of crème fraiche. It was flavourful and cooled down the soup nicely. So let's forget the recipe for the soup and just go with the one for the tzatziki.

Tzatziki
1 cucumber (english)
2 tsp salt
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp white wine vinegar
1 cup plain yogurt
small bunch of fresh mint leaves, chopped

1. Peel, seed, and dice the cucumber. Place the flesh in a colander and spinkle with salt. Leave to dehydrate for 30 minutes.
2. Mix the garlic with the vinegar and stir into the yogurt. Pat the cucumber dry on kitchen paper and fold it into the yogurt.
3. Season to taste and stir in the mint.
4. Chill until required.