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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Posted on March 6, 2014 by DebbieN
Round spare spanakopita just for us after the big kiddush

Round spare pinwheel-style spanakopita just for us at home. The big ones for the brunch had three pounds of spinach apiece (and were cut in small diamonds), but they still went together pretty fast–except for squeezing all that spinach dry…

This weekend I did it again–I made the kiddush, or in common speech a lunch buffet, for my congregation’s Saturday morning service. My husband kind of volunteered us for this week and because he doesn’t cook, most or all of the cooking, shopping, chopping and schlepping landed on my shoulders.

Last time he volunteered us, it was for our anniversary, and  I was ready to skip ahead to the divorce until I got over it, because it’s a lot of work to cook for 60 or so people who like to eat. And kibbitz. Especially when the 60 suddenly turns into 80-plus and having to use the synagogue kitchen with the more complicated and confusing rules on only a week’s notice. As they did this time…..

Soooo….a two-day hell of shopping and then marathon cooking-and-juggling in my little galley kitchen. The microwave got a serious workout. So did the food processor and the oven. Sometimes all at once. And it was raining hard for three days, so bringing things over to the synagogue kitchen as I went got a little tricky. I triple-wrapped the chocolate cake and stuck it in a USPS Priority Mail box so it wouldn’t get left out in the rain. Same idea for the spanakopita trays.

A few hints about cooking big and real for a synagogue brunch, learned the hard way by moi and passed on for your edification and safety (and sanity):

1. You can buy a 6-lb can  of chickpeas for massive half-gallon batches of hummus (Mid-East brand, maybe Goya as well). Cost? about $5. But–as I found out, and I’m glad no one was filming the process–industrial-sized can equals industrial-strength steel. A dinky hand-operated can opener is no match for such an item. I got just far enough to be able to pry open a kind of spout but there were tears and long-fluent-repetitive-all-throughout-the-house swearing sessions involved.

Still….

2. If you have a good corner greengrocer, you can buy quantities of eggplant for cheap–eleven or twelve eggplants made for a large tray of roast eggplant and onion slices (with garlic slivers and za’atar sprigs and olive oil) plus a large vat of baba ghanouj. Only the five eggplants I nuked for the baba ghanouj didn’t feel like cooperating fully when it was time to peel them. Might have been easier to peel first, then nuke, since it was all going into the food processor eventually. Next time…

3. Whole smoked whitefish for whitefish salad comes two ways–cold-smoked or hot-smoked. What’s the difference? I asked the counter guy at my favorite Armenian grocery. “Cold-smoked is a little less hard,” he said. So I bought it, thinking he meant the hot-smoked was tough as shoeleather and twice as chewy. I was wrong. Cold-smoked actually means the fish is smoked raw, like lox, only a little drier and tougher. But you don’t necessarily want to put it in whitefish salad that way. Man, it still had the scales on too. I couldn’t get it off the bones for love or money, and there were a lot of bones.

However, the microwave came to the rescue. I cut the fish in half and Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, Beans and legumes, breads, breakfast, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Dips, fish, frugality, Grains, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

Posted on June 5, 2010 by DebbieN

Long ago, I threatened to post the unlovely but effective method of peeling cooked eggplants that I learned the hard way, in a kibbutz kitchen. We used to make baba ghanouj routinely for a thousand members–something like 50 to 75 baked eggplants went into it each time, mixed in a stand mixer the size of a wheelbarrow with a base that was cemented into the floor. You can’t be fooling around with spoons and forks when you’re working on that scale. Instead, we cooled the eggplants in a huge colander and then started squeezing them out as though they were pastry bags or tubes of toothpaste.

It takes a bit of practice…to say the least. But each eggplant only takes about half a minute to empty into the colander, and once you get the method down, the skin stays together and is just about completely clean inside. Very effective. Not very dignified, though, unless you do it enough to get good at it.

However, since I have no vanity whatsoever, I finally took some pictures (not easy to shoot while actually squeezing the eggplants, so don’t expect photogenic–eggplant is only pretty raw…) and have steeled myself to walk you through it. Wear goggles and a hairnet the first time if you’re afraid of flying goop, or make your little sister do it first. And don’t forget to rinse your hands (and arms) well right afterward, because the juice is still a bit caustic and will make them itch after awhile. Anyway, the following is for if your little sister refuses to take the bait.  Click directly on any of the pictures if you want a closer view.

How to Squeeze an Eggplant

First, microwave your eggplant(s) (best if you’re only doing up to 3; any more and it’s worth roasting them for a whole hour in the oven at 400F). Scrub them well, cut off the cap (watch out for thorns!), rub or sprinkle a little salt on the damp skins, and set them to microwave 10 minutes on HIGH, until they’re soft and collapsed.

whole eggplant before microwaving for baba ghanouj

Whole eggplant prepped to microwave for baba ghanouj

Eggplant after microwaving

After microwaving 10 minutes, the eggplant has collapsed

Next, let the eggplant cool enough to handle–this is probably the most important part. Trying to squeeze out a scalding eggplant leads to explosions of scalding eggplant goop, plus the peel usually toughens a little as it cools, which makes ruptures a little less likely.

–Am I making it sound good yet? No?–hang in there.

Poking the eggplant

The all-important poke

Set the cooling eggplant cut-end-down in a colander over a bowl to drain off some of the juices. If you have the asbestos-like fingers for it, you can poke a hole in the cut end while it’s still hot and earn yourself untold macho points as long as you only wince after you’ve slunk off to the bathroom. Never let ’em see you cry. If you’re not that brash, you’ll have to poke a hole in the cut end once it cools. That’s the easy part.

Once the eggplant’s cooled enough to wrap your hands around it, it’s showtime. Keep the cut end facing down.

Grab the eggplant like a pastry bag, cut end down

Grab the eggplant like a pastry bag, cut end down

Cup your hands around the fat round end at the top and very gradually push in and downward, closing your hands over the top, Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, Microwave tricks, Oddities, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

How to Nuke an Eggplant

Posted on July 12, 2009 by DebbieN
Eggplant after microwaving

After microwaving 10 minutes, the eggplant has collapsed

Eggplant is one of those warm-climate foods. It’s big, cheap, and plentiful, it goes with everything from garlicky oregano-and-fennel laden tomato sauce to nutmeg-tinged custard or cumin/cinnamon-scented Greek and North African dishes, to curries and darkly soy-glazed Chinese and Thai dishes. You can deep-fry it, panfry it, grill it and serve it room-temperature under a glossy layer of olive oil, marinate it, wrap it around other fillings, stuff it, roast it, make spreads with it… There’s even a Greek eggplant “spoon sweet” and at least one eggplant “jam” from Morocco. To say nothing of pink-tinged sour eggplant pickles, one of my favorite additions at the Israeli felafel stands.

The only thing you don’t really want to do with eggplant is eat it raw.

I NEVER bother with the usual cookbook directions for eggplant. All of them slavishly recopy instructions from their predecessors–salt it, drain it, fry it in tons of expensive olive oil, which it will soak up mercilessly, bake it for an hour only to find it still has spongy raw spots… They never bother to update, or even retest, the traditional assumptions that make eggplant such a pain.

You can forget most of that if you just nuke your eggplants first. Most of the stuff people do to their eggplants comes of just trying to get it cooked through. The salt’s to get rid of some of the water; the fat’s to cook it hotter and let the juices steam inside the slices.

Microwaving takes care of both, needs neither fat nor salt, and it’s very quick–10 minutes on HIGH on a pyrex pie plate for 1 or 2 decent-sized eggplants and you’ve got either collapsed whole eggplant(s) ready for baba ghanouj or a fan of slices or a mountain of bite-sized cubes. All of them cooked through and ready to do something more interesting with.

I used to think I was alone in the wilderness on this one, because NO ethnic cookbook–or any other cookbook with eggplant recipes–ever considers the existence of microwaving, much less condones it for cooking actual food. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How to Nuke an Eggplant