Summer Sliders

Oh my gosh are these delicious. If the base of your stack is a garden tomato slice, then you could call these a summer vegetable napoleon. But if you start with a piece of baked eggplant, these become sliders that you can handily pick up to eat!

For two people you’ll need:

2 med very fresh eggplant

a few sliced garden tomatoes (if you don’t have really good tomatoes this is not the dish for you)

fresh mozarrella, sliced in a few slices, however thick it suits you

Some fresh basil, chopped in fine strips

olive oil

commercial bread crumbs. I use unseasoned, but you could use whatever you have

s+p to taste

an egg

Start with quarter inch slices of peeled very fresh eggplant, and dunk them in beaten egg you thinned with a little water. Then dredge in breadcrumbs. Put a fair amount of olive oil on a foil lined cookie sheet and arrange the slices on here. Then, I like to use my Misto to spray the tops with olive oil.. I use the oven and heat it to 375. When they brown on one side flip them to finish. (You could, of course, fry these in a pan)

Make little stacks: a piece of eggplant, a piece of cheese, a little basil, a tomato another eggplant slice, more tomato, basil, eggplant, voila, cute yummy slider. Or start with a tomato base and commit to using a fork. We’ve found 3 stacks each makes a very nice supper.

Fry Baby, Fry

I cannot remember the last time I fried anything…I mean actual frying in a least an inch of bubbling hot oil.

It is the Season of the Eggplant around here and after the caponata was put up and the eggplant lasagnas safely tucked into the garage freezer there were still a few small eggplants in the garden.

Dinner was looming.

I had a vision of small golden eggplant cubes, enrobed in a fresh tomato sauce and served up on pasta.

It seemed a no brainer to get busy with the cast iron chicken fryer and heat up some oil. I peeled two smallish eggplants cut them into squares about three quarters of an inch all around, doused them in beaten egg and tossed them in a bag with bread crumbs . Corn and peanut oils are preferred for frying because of their high smoke point, but I had canola on hand, about 1.5 inches of oil total, I’d say. I was frying at approx. 350-375 degrees ( yes I used a thermometer) and did not have any problems.

Because the cubes are small and vegetable, they fry very quickly in the hot oil. They were all I’d hope for and more. The tomato sauce I mentioned was very simple: chopped up 2 or so garden tomatoes, a bit of fresh basil, garden garlic, a little olive oil. And I added a teensy bit of Wondra to provide little body.

The cubes were custardy inside and crisp on the outside. The tomato sauce was velvety and sweet. And this did not take very long. It’s one of those meals where you have to think and make a plan ( do sauce first, heat pasta water, get oil heating, cut up eggplant), but once stuff it prepped it goes very quickly. And completely worthy of the small planning effort.

Hail Kale

The good thing about kale is it thrives during winter when nothing else is in the garden. The other thing about kale is it continues right on into the early summer. I am growing Laciniato, an Italian heirloom variety. It is also known as dinosaur kale. It has bumpy, bluish green pre-historic looking leaves.

We love kale for its earthy green flavor and its versatility.  I am sad to see it going by.

We were halfway through eating when the thought came to me to post this easy and most delicious kale dish we had last night.  The “bones” of the dish are from Alice Waters.  I’m sorry we ate the meal before I could whip out my camera.

For 2 people:

About a pound of kale. Remove stem and central vein and chop roughly. Rinse well.

Approx. 1/8 C olive oil

½ large onion , sliced

2 or 3 garlic cloves

1-2 T  red wine or cider vinegar

Pasta of your choice ( I used YDFM Mezzaluna)

Over med/low heat in a large frying pan, cook onions in olive oil til they become medium golden brown.  When these are correct color, boil and salt pasta water. Add a layer of kale to the onions, add some salt, let them wilt, then add the rest of the kale. Stir in the garlic, and mix the onions into all the kale.  Put pasta in to cook.

When kale is wilted and tender enough to your taste, take off lid and let any excess liquid evaporate. Take off heat and add vinegar. Stir in.

Serve kale mixture on top of pasta. A little grated cheese doesn’t hurt. And you could add a pinch of dried red chili pepper, or even a little hot fresh garden pepper.

This could be a really fast meal if you skipped the onions. But they add a very nice sweetness. So if dinner time is crazy, you could think about precooking the onions some other time while you are up to something else and holding in the fridge til you need them.

winter wonderful-ness

During the warm months, we enjoy something we call “on top of’. This dish is built with a green salad dressed in home made vinaigrette, perhaps some olives or red onion and tomato, whatever looks good from the garden, and a cooked protein, served on top of the salad. Sometimes shrimp, sometimes grilled chicken, sometimes a bison burger.

I constructed a winter version of this recently, using a variety of vegetables I had in the fridge.
I cleaned and cut parsnips and carrots into two inch lengths, cut a few Brussels sprouts in half, threw in a few smallish pieces of garden broccoli and a handful of grape tomatoes. All this was tossed in olive oil and put in a shallow pan in one layer. I pricked a hot Italian sausage and laid this in the pan on the veg and cooked it all at 400 til the sausage was done and the veg were still firm, but no longer crunchy.

After I sprinkled the cooked veg with some kosher salt, I served this with whole wheat couscous under the veg, with the sausage on top. It was a colorful land delicious winter dinner.

Take a look in your veg drawer and see what needs to be used . You’ll be happily surprised at how easy it is to make a really good meal. And if you prefer to forgo the meat, the roasted veg and the couscous stand well on their own.

Beautiful Brussels Sprouts

Now that we are well into Fall and approaching holiday menu planning, there has been a lot of chatter about Brussels sprouts in various cooking magazines. This is good. Brussels sprouts really are versatile as more than a side-to-major-hunk-o’-poultry or other protein.

Earlier in the Fall I discovered how delicious they could be added to pasta. Here is what I did tonight:

Plan seven Brussels sprouts per person. If you have a Cuisinart, terrific. Use the finer blade attachment and slice them up after removing the stem ends. If you are using a knife, slice them as fine as you can. Be careful. They roll.

Render some chopped pancetta, about 2 oz. per person. After the pieces are brown, remove and save the fat.

Slice a small onion ( for two, a med. or large, for more people, or if you have them , a few shallots) and brown over medium low heat in a mixture of olive oil and a little butter and the pancetta rendering.

Chop up some kalamata olives. Chop up some garlic.

Start heating your well salted pasta water. I used fusilli for pasta. I am particularly pleased with the joyous springiness of this pasta. ( I plan about 3 oz. pasta per person)

After the pasta has been in the boiling water for about 2 minutes, put the sliced Brussels sprouts, the browned onions (or shallots), the chopped garlic, and all the pan oils and the pancetta in a preheated skillet. Add a bit of dried red pepper, too. Grind some fresh pepper in there. Toss over a relatively high heat. til crisp-tender, remove from heat. Drain pasta and toss in the Brussels sprouts mixture. Add the kalamata olives.

Add a handful of freshly grated parmesan cheese. Serve in bowls.

A full bodied red wine is nice with this.

shades of summer

There was a beautiful bowl of colorful tomatoes in my kitchen and I knew I had to use them soon. And those listada di gandia eggplants were getting big enough to pick.. how about a nice little summer lasagna for the two of us? Not a gooey, dense lasagna, but a light and almost fluffy concoction: summery.

I made a quick sauce of the tomatoes with a little garlic, only partially cooking the tomato pieces to hold their shape. They were so lovely in the pan I was inspired take them outside into the midday light to snap the picture seen here. I thickened the sauce with a bit of butter and flour mashed together (the French call this beurre manié) sliced, oiled and roasted the eggplants and made a small béchamel, (or, as it is called in Italy: salsa balsamella) and tossed a little grated romano cheese in to it. I picked some basil and chopped up a handful of leaves. I browned up some hot Italian sausage.

I never cook lasagna noodles, I just soften them in hot water for about 10-15 minutes and pat dry before layering in the pan.

As with any lasagna, I started with tomato sauce on the bottom of the ceramic dish, then layered noodles, sausage , béchamel, eggplant, basil noodle and tomato sauce. Topped it with more grated cheese baked it for about an hour. I let it stand for an hour and served it with a little green salad. It was light but creamy and packed with summer flavor.

Super Ribs

The Super Bowl was coming. And so were three friends. We are not even close to what one would call real fans, we are interested observers of cultural phenomena and we love the half time shows, the ads and the excitement of the BIG games. Our younger family members are genuine fans, and we support their teams. But even though we are not avid sports fans…we are avid eaters.

Sunday’s event seemed to be calling for ribs. Here is what I did about that.

I rubbed the racks of pork back ribs with a mixture of chopped garlic, hot and sweet pîmenton and kosher salt.
I let these rest, tightly covered, in the fridge for two days.

Then I baked them at 300 degrees in a foil-lined pan, completely sealed, for two and a half hours. Then I uncovered them, let them cool and put them in a large ziplock bag in the fridge ‘til I was ready to heat up for eating. I really tried to hold onto as much moisture as I could.

I made sauce: some low-sugar ketchup, some cider vinegar, more chopped garlic, some soy sauce and a bit of dark molasses. On game day, this was spread over the ribs in a foil-lined pan, covered in foil and warmed at 250 ‘til they were hot.
I heated the remainder of the sauce and served it along side the cut up ribs.

I served this with slaw with toasted mustard and caraway seed dressing and big dishtowels as napkins.

Our guests went crazy for these!