Moussaka

We love moussaka, that wonderful Greek casserole of eggplant, tomatoes, and ground lamb. But I do not recommend the recipe from Joy of Cooking. It does not taste particularly Greek — it just tastes like Joy. Gruyere as the only cheese? Currants?

Ratatouille lasagna

We love the flavor combination of ratatouille: tomatoes, eggplant, summer squash, supplemented with onions, garlic, peppers, and herbs. But the vegetable mix is never satisfying as a dinner: you eat and eat and eat and never fill up. Much better is a lasagna, layering the vegetables between cheese and pasta. So we decided the have the best of both worlds.

We began by slicing and lightly salting the vegetables (eggplant, onions, bell peppers, zucchini) and spread them in single layers in pans to roast uncovered in the oven. Meanwhile, we made a pasta dough with one part white flour to two parts semolina, a little salt, a couple eggs, and enough water to hold it together but not so much as to make the dough tacky. We rolled the dough through the hand-cranked pasta maker and let it dry on a rack. Then we put together our cheese mixture: minced garlic, grated mozzarella, grated romano, fresh thyme, grated black pepper, and ricotta. Finally, we diced some tomatoes, saving the juive, and mixed in some diced onion and chopped basil and a little salt.

Ingredients prepared, we started layering the lasagna. Begin by putting a splash of oil and just a little of the tomato juice at the bottom of the pan, and then a layer of noodles. Then some of the tomato mixture, a layer of zucchini, and a layer of cheese, with some of the roasted onions and peppers dotted through. On top of all this, another layer of pasta, then tomatoes, eggplants, cheese, and continuing in this way until the casserole is assembled. End with noodles and a thick layer of cheese, decorated with some roasted onions and peppers.

Cover the casserole with a tent of foil, and bake about half an hour. Then remove the foil and cut it into strips to wrap just around the edges of the pan, so that any noodles showing don't crisp too much in the oven, and bake another half hour. Let the casserole cool about ten minutes before slicing and serving.

Last night in Indian Lake: homemade bread, hummus, baba ghanoush, and salad

Composed salad with beets and deviled eggs

In the fish salad are: spring red onions, capers, purple carrots. The potatoes are boiled and tossed with garlic and dill, as usual. There are two types of beets — golden and the usual deep red — and are prepared the way Alice Waters says: wash but do not peel, remove stems leaving about 1 inch, bake in a covered pan with a splash of water about an hour, plunge in ice water, remove skins and chop, and let sit in vinegar (no oil) and salt for at least half an hour. The deviled eggs are very simple: along with the yolks, the filling has some prepared mustard and some paprika, and that's about it.

Three meals

A commenter asked about our normal meal time frame: How long do we cook? How long do we eat? Are we always carefully "slow"?

To the last question, yes: we make almost everything from scratch, using fresh local ingredients as much as possible. (Some exceptions: when there are not tomatoes, we eat canned tomatoes, but we can those ourselves. "Asian" ingredients, like soy sauce and coconut milk, we do not try to source locally. Milk is local, but most of our cheese is imported. And so on.) To the second question, our meals are just about exactly an hour of eating. In particular, we usually put on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me to listen to while we eat, and we finish the salad (we always end with a salad) just as they're finishing the show.

But as to how long cooking takes? Here are three recent case studies.


Thursday's dinner was very fast to cook — start-to-finish twenty minutes. Fill a large pot half-way with water, bring to a boil, and add some salt. Meanwhile, scrub two pounds of mussels and set aside. Wash and chop a medium head of of broccoli, and begin steaming in a colander set in the top of the pot. In a large fry pan, melt butter and olive oil and sauté a few cloves of garlic, chopped. When the broccoli has turned bright green, transfer it to the sauté pan, pour a pound of dried rigatoni into the boiling water, and set the timer to ten minutes. Begin sautéing the broccoli, adding salt and more oils as needed. After three minutes, move the cleaned mussels to the colander and steam six minutes. When the timer has one minute left, transfer the mussels to a bowl, and set on the table — also finish setting the table and open a bottle of wine. Rinse the colander, drain the pasta when the timer goes off, and mix with the broccoli in a large serving bowl. Serve with a brick of pecorino romano and a peeler for shaving over the pasta.








For comparison, consider Wednesday's dinner of ratatouille and carrot cake. B made the carrot cake in the afternoon; the ratatouille is from Chez Panisse Vegetables, and is described as "serves 8" (the two of us ate half of that recipe as an entre, and had the other half cold for lunch the next day). Mise en place is essential for a long meal like this. The ratatouille is easy, but it's a lot of chopping: make into half-inch cubes equal amounts of eggplant (one larger), onion, tomato, peppers, and summer squash; begin with the eggplant and salt it liberally, so that it can drain in the colander while you prepare the other veggies. Also mince ten cloves garlic and prepare a bouquet garni (the recipe said just basil; we used a mix of garden herbs). Then dry the eggplant, and sauté until golden in the bottom of a large pot, remove and set aside. Sauté the onions until transclucent, add the garlic and peppers, a few minutes later the squash and bouquet garni, and a few minutes later the tomatoes. Bring to a boil, cook ten minutes, add the eggplant, cook another twenty, let cool a little, and serve. Plan about an hour if you're doing all the chopping yourself, and more time to make the dessert, etc. (Ratatouille is delicious, but not entirely satisfying as the only course.)







The final meal this week was about forty minutes of cook time. With a peeler, make very thin slices of potato (two medium taters is probably enough), and lay out overlapping on a piece of wax paper. Salt and rub with a little oil, then place on the potatoes a large fillet of rock fish. Liberally add salt, pepper, and herbs (we used thyme, fennel tops, and rosemary), and then wrap the fish in the potato skin, using the wax paper to help roll the fish. Wrap in parchment (or wax paper, but it doesn't work as well), and bake in a preheated oven 20 minutes. Meanwhile, slice thin two small yellow onions, sauté with salt and olive oil until translucent, add a few cloves minced garlic, and then the stems and then the greens of a bunch of silver chard.

The Farm; Canning; A Bountiful Harvest

After two years of buying Riverdog Farm's CSA box, on Monday we finally drove out to the farm for a visit. Riverdog is on two sites right now, about five miles away from each other, and about 90 miles from Berkeley. In Guinda, we met up with the guy who runs the CSA program, a recent Cal graduate. He showed us their packing and loading facility — Riverdog runs trucks to the Bay Area daily — including their bedroom-sizes walk-in tomato refrigerator, and then introduced us to the chickens. Afterwards, he helped us pick out a large box of Early Girl tomatoes to take home for canning.

We had brought the camera, but didn't remember to take pictures until we got to the second site, in Brooks, where we went for a picnic. The Farm is open for CSA members to come by anytime; I don't know if we'll make the drive regularly, we did have a lovely picnic spot under a line of old walnut trees.







Tuesday was canning day, and sadly I have no photos to show for it. We canned mostly Early Girl tomatoes, with two jars of Romas mixed in. The jars range from whole to diced, all of them peeled. The general rule of thumb is that you cannot can vegetables without a pressure canner, but tomatoes, really a fruit, are an exception: they are acidic enough.

I followed the recipe from Blue Ribbon Preserves for raw-packed whole tomatoes. Begin heating a water-bath canner, and also bring to a boil another large pot of water. (And if you're smart have a tea kettle sitting by hot, so that you can refill any pot that starts to run low.) Lastly, make a bowl of ice water, and hope that you have more ice in the refrigerator if you are canning a lot.

Wash your tomatoes, remove the greens, and score the bottoms of about six tomatoes with a cross. Drop the tomatoes into boiling water, count to 40, and with a slotted spoon fish out the tomatoes and immediately plunge into the ice water. Putter around a little, and then peel the tomatoes: the skin should come right off. Place the whole skinned tomatoes directly into clean jars, or half or dice first. I fit about six or seven small Early Girls per quart jar, and they were just too big for the pints; I could fit about 12 Romas per quart. Anyway, add 2 Tbsp lemon juice per quart jar or 1 Tbsp per pint. The lemon juice is extremely important and should not be reduced: canning kills most pathogens, but not botulism; botulism though cannot survive in high-acidity environments. Cover the tomatoes with boiling water, leaving 1/2 inch head space, add new clean lids and old clean bands, and process in the water bath canner 45 minutes.




Tomorrow we leave for Oregon; we will be gone a week and a half. As such, today was Harvest Day for our small garden.

The beans in the back have climbed their eight-foot bamboo poles and are falling over. Shelled, this pile yielded a bit over three cups white beans, and we cooked them ten minutes (the Common Bean contains a toxin that breaks down in ten minutes boiling water; in particular, cousins of the Kidney and Cannelini beans should not be eaten raw in quantity), let them cool, and then pureed the soft beans with garlic, rosemary, salt, olive oil, and a little lemon juice. This old standard will make our sandwiches for the drive tomorrow.

Our golden cherry tomato has gone crazy, and is taking over the planter box; we've eaten tubs already, picked three quarts today, and expect a fair amount more when we get back, given the number of green fruits still on the vine — and it's still flowering. The Black Kim tomato is heavy with large green fruit, still very firm, and the Green Zebras should be ripe soon, although I can't really tell when those green guys are ripe. The Purple Cherokee, though, was a dud: it has one flower still, and one little green fruit, and this beauty:




Our friend came over last night and brought four beautiful large summer squash; my boyfriend cooked one of them tonight into a wonderful Ratatouille with a large eggplant, five or six tomatoes, one very large white onion, four cloves of garlic, and a little dried basil. He sautéed the garlic, onions, and basil first in olive oil in the cast iron dutch oven; then he added the sliced vegetables in layers and baked everything at 350°F for an hour. At the table, we garnished the baked veggies with shaved Parmesan. The vegetables release a lot of liquid when baking, so be sure to have a crusty sourdough standing by. We paired the dinner with a very nice Pinot Noir from Red Bicyclette; we have been consistently happy with both the quality and price of their wines.

Eggplant stuffed with cheese and tomato sauce

On Wednesday, we found ourselves at a bit of a loss. We had two small eggplants, lots of tomatoes, some sweet peppers, a full bunch of basil, and that's about it. After much cookbook reading, we walked to Berkeley Bowl for cheese.

Wash, remove the greens from two eggplants, slice them in half, and bake them face-down on an oiled pan for at least 40 minutes.

In a medium sauce pot, sauté thin-sliced onions in salted olive oil. When the onions are translucent, add diced tomatoes, and cook until the juices have rendered. Add capers, remove from the heat, and set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix ricotta, grated provolone, and a little grated romano. Add minced basil and oregano, and one egg. Or, in our case, the garlic aioli and the leftover egg-white from the previous day.

When the eggplant is cooked, remove it from the heat, end let cool until handleable. Scoop out the inside of each eggplant, and save, because eggplant is yummy. Fill each eggplant with the cheese mixture, and place the eggplants in a baking dish with high sides. Cover everything with the tomato sauce, and if like me you have leftover everything, fill in around the eggplant with the cheese and tomatoes. Bake 10 minutes, so that the tomato sauce starts to bubble.

If you start with large eggplants (ours were very small), rather than stuffing half eggplants, slice the eggplant thin, salt each side and fry for a few minutes per side in oil, and then roll the cheese in the eggplant slices, cover everything with tomato, and bake ten minutes.

Hummus, Babaganoush, and Roasted Grapes

Nothing completely new tonight, but the meal was tasty.


It's best to soak dried beans overnight, but if you forget, as we did, it's generally just as good to boil them an hour in the morning. Never salt the water for boiling beans: it toughens the skin. So, bring to boil and then simmer 1 cup dried garbanzo beans and 1 cup dried canelini in 6 cup water for an hour, remove from heat, and let sit about 6 hours. Bring back to a boil and cook 3 to 4 hours, until the beans are falling apart. Drain the beans, and mash with 1/4 cup olive oil, 1/3 cup lemon juice, 1/4 cup tahini, one clove minced garlic, minced rosemary and parsley, and cumin and salt to taste.


Score the sides of three small eggplants into strips, to aid the later peeling. Bake eggplant close to an hour. Remove from the heat, and let cool. Or, if you are me, don't let them cool enough and just be careful. Also if you are me, unintentionally undercook the eggplant and then blend it in the blender. Regardless, combine the eggplant with a lot of tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, garlic, cumin, and paprika, all to taste.


A year ago I Heart Kale suggested making savory roasted grapes, and they quick became one of my favorite easy dishes, because I love the sweet-and-salty combination. The reds today, which were wonderful table grapes, lost most of their flavor when roasting, but the greens, to sour to eat raw, were wonderful. Toss grapes with salt and lots of olive oil, and back uncovered in a glass pan about 30 minutes.


We paired the meal with the "French Rosé" from Red Bicyclette. We were dubious of the rosé, having had a series of much-too-sweet "white" Zinfandels, but Alice Waters seems to love rosé wine. And we've been very happy with the Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir from Red Bicyclette, so we decided to give them a try. Turns out, it's very good: light with fruit overtones, but understated.

Homemade linguini with eggplant sauce

Score the skin of a large eggplant into strips and roast 400°F in the oven 40 minutes. Meanwhile, roll out fresh linguini — a few cups semolina flour, some salt, and a few eggs. When the eggplant is done, let cool until you can handle it, and while you let it cool, saute in olive oil in a large saucepot: one large red onion, minced, a few cloves garlic, minced, and a fair number of sweet red or orange peppers, deseeded and diced. When you can handle the eggplant, peel it, slice into small chunks (dispose of the tough top end), and add to the saucepot. Mash the eggplant into a mush with a wooden spoon. Add two tomatoes, diced, some salt, a little paprika, and a handful of fresh oregano. While the flavors in the sauce marry, bring to boil a large pot of water and cook the pasta two minutes, until it floats. Drain and toss with a little oil to prevent sticking. Serve the eggplant sauce over the linguini, and garnish with oregano blossoms.

Ratatouille

Sorry to go three weeks without posting. On July 15, we had a baked ratatouille. The important ingredients in ratatouille are tomatoes, summer squash, and eggplant. I think we also had onions, garlic, fresh herbs, fennel, and potato. The potato didn't work, but everything else did.

Picnic: Lebanese food

My boyfriend and I love hiking and dinner picnics. Yesterday we had a particularly nice one. We started at Inspiration Point in Tilden Regional Park, and followed the paved trail about a mile and a half, turning off at a wide dirt track to the left. This trail leads to the top of Wildcat Peak, where we ate dinner to magnificent views.

After taking a bushwhack trail back down, we continued on the paved trail another mile or so, past a cow grate, and then took another left on another dirt road. This lead up a gentle hill through cow pastures to a bench with even more incredible views: the city, the bridge, two other bridges, the headlands, another city, everything. We had dessert there.

Unfortunately, our camera battery ran out just as we were starting on the hike.

The meal began with babaganoush (score the skin of a large eggplant and bake at 400 degrees for 40-60 minutes, let cool, de-skin, and mash with tahini, olive oil, salt, paprika, cumin, and the juice of one lemon) and crackers; course number two was a chickpea dish invented out of lazyness (wash, shell, and wash one pound fresh green garbanzo beans, cover with water and simmer ten minutes and drain, and mix with tahini, olive oil, salt, minced garlic, juice of one lemon, cumin, and coarsely chopped fresh parsley — essentially this is un-mashed hummus). The last course was a Greek salad: half a head of lettuce, washed and ripped into the small pieces; one large Cherokee tomato, sliced thin; one fresh red onion, sliced thin; Kalamata olives; Corsican feta; garden oregano; olive oil, salt, and the juice of one lemon.

Dessert was a delicious lemon bar, made by my boyfriend. Can you tell we have a lot of lemons right now?

7 October 2008: Greek feast for two

The top image is of roasted grapes, an amazing dish. For hummus, babaganoush, dolma, and side salad recipes, see my similar earlier Greek feast.

Six-course meal for two

We had enough for a third and maybe a fourth, but last night's meal my boyfriend and I shared alone.

1. Lavash Crackers. In a kitchenaid with paddle attachment, combine in order 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup whole-wheat bread flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp instant yeast, 1 Tbsp brown sugar, 1 Tbsp olive oil, 1/2 cup water. Mix until dough comes together into a single ball. Let dough sit 15 minutes, then knead by hand 15 minutes. Let proof 2 hrs until doubled. Degas, relax, and roll into a flat rectangle, just the same size as your largest cookie sheet, and transfer to said sheet lined with parchment. Mist the top of the dough with water, sprinkle with stripes of caraway seed, cumin seed, sesame seed, poppy seed, and paprika, and slice diagonally into cracker-width strips. Bake 15 minutes in a 350°F preheated oven — strips will grow together, but will snap apart.
   
2. Baba ganoush. Pierce two medium eggplants, and bake 40 minutes in a 400°F oven until brown and mushy and starting to deflate. Remove from heat, shock in cold water, and peel. Combine eggplant insides in a blender, food processor, or standing mixer with whisk, along with salt, a few Tbsp tahini, juice of 1/4 lemon, and one minced smoked paprika peppers, to taste. Transfer to small serving bowl, sprinkle liberally with crushed dried paprika, and drizzle with olive oil.
   
3. Green hummus. Shell a pound and a half of washed fresh garbanzo beans. Boil beans 40 minutes until soft. Drain, and transfer to blender, food processor, or standing mixer with whisk. Combine with a few Tbsp tahini, a Tbsp olive oil, juice of 1/4 lemon, one clove or more minced garlic, salt, and three sprigs minced parsley to taste. Transfer to small serving bowl, sprinkle liberally with crushed dried sumac berry, and drizzle with olive oil.
   
4. Side of feta and olives. In a small serving bowl, combine 1/4 lb pitted kalamata olives, 1/4 lb goat's feta in 1/4-inch cubes, three sprigs fresh oregano, juice of 1/4 lemon, and drizzle with olive oil.
   
5. Dolmas. Cook one cup dried brown rice (1.5 cup salted water, covered, brought to a boil, reduced to simmer 30 minutes, then left to steam at least 20 minutes until ready). Since you don't have much experience rolling dolmas, you'll use more grape leaves than really optimal, so prepare to use half a 1-pt jar of pickled grape leaves. Roll 10 large dolmas.
   
6. Salad. Wash and remove stems from one bunch purslane. Wash and chop 6 baby lemon cucumbers. Combine purslane, cucumbers, and juice of 1/4 lemon, salt, and olive oil.

Refrigerate everything before serving, and pair with a chilled white wine for a fantastic summer dinner. Total cook time: three hours or so of continuous work for two?