Saturday lunch: Baba ghanoush

Baba ghanoush (roasted eggplant dip) with pita and mixed baby greens salad.

We still had one eggplant left from last week's market, so we made this dip in order to use it right away. Incidentally, we ended up having to make our own tahini paste by grinding white sesame seeds because we turned out not to have any.

The baby greens mix, though not from Yuno this time, was pretty amazing:



We recognized spinach, purslane, baby Red Russian kale, nasturtium flowers, and possibly arugula - but we haven't ID'd the other seven specimens yet.

Sunday Japanese Lunch

Eggplant salad with tart sesame dressing and cold soba noodles.

One of my favorite things about eggplant is its unique flavor and texture - it doesn't quite taste like anything else, and it often doesn't seem identifiably plant-like at all. In some dishes, the texture is reminiscent of meat or mushroom. This is one such dish where you might be hard-pressed to identify the main ingredient, despite the simplicity of the preparation. The eggplant is simply peeled, cut into matchsticks, and blanched for 3 minutes, then tossed with a ground white sesame-vinegar-tamari-sugar dressing.

As we've mentioned before, eggplants just love to hybridize, and it can sometimes be difficult to determine which varietal you've got. Here's the green and white beauty we picked up yesterday:



The pattern and color are reminiscent of the small, round Thai eggplants, sometimes called brinjals in Indian groceries - but, at over a pound, it's too large to be one of those. It's probably a hybrid or close relative.

Tuesday: Baingan Chole

Baingan chole - Punjabi-style eggplant and chickpea. We got this recipe from a blog we've mentioned before - the lovely Mahanandi.

Eggplant and chickpea is a classic combination; there are also similar Moroccan-style tagines which are just spiced differently. If you think you don't like eggplant, then you might want to try buying some fresh from a farmer's market. Eggplant gets bitter quickly when stored, and the big dark purple grocery store varietal just really isn't the best one, so it doesn't really compare with all of the interesting types you can find now in the market. They range from tiny to huge, from round to long, and come in colors including white, light purple, dark purple, green, and even bright orange.

Fun fact: the varietal of eggplant which was originally popular was a small, oblong, white type that looked much like an egg - thus the name.

Saturday night pizza

Homemade pizza with broiled eggplant, fennel, mozzarella, Parmesan, and anchovies.

Making pizza dough at home is surprisingly easy, if you allow enough time in advance for the dough to rise. We've made pizza on a few occasions now, but we hadn't done anything more exotic than tomato-basil-mozzarella-anchovy. Tonight, we decided to branch out, using our first eggplants of the year:



Aren't they beauts? Eggplants are in the nightshade family (solanaceae), along with tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes. Like its siblings, eggplant seems prone to hybridize -- or, at least, there are a mind-boggling number of varietals available.

Here's a shot of a pizza ready to go in the oven, with some dough resting in the background: