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Little Green Footballs

Posted on May 26, 2013 by DebbieN

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

Two or three weeks ago I got a frantic email from the assistant at my daughter’s Hebrew school: could I lead a cooking session for the 8th graders for an hour that Sunday?

Teens and preteens are not my specialty–I have a friend who’s really terrific with them; she’s an 8th grade and high school teacher and would rather deal with kids than write. I’m the other way around, and my own kid’s turning 13 very soon. Very soon.

Suffice it to say, my answer probably should have been, “Who me? Are you off your nut? Cook with preteens in only an hour?”

And then I thought–but wait. Fillo. It’s inexpensive (a big plus), it’s easy enough to fold, it’s almost (if you squint) kind of a craft. Like origami. Make some tasty and quick fillings for it (though no nuts–schools have gotten annoyingly leary of anything with nuts. How are you supposed to teach baklava? Eh? Eh???) and let the kids go to town, a couple of sheets of fillo apiece in the synagogue kitchen. An hour should do it, and it’s a cool, sophisticated food to know how to make–very different from the standard summer camp challah with blue or green food coloring.

So…I bought a couple of packets of fillo (about $2.69 for a roll of 20-24 sheets), a couple of pounds of loose-frozen spinach, an onion, some garlic, a bottle of olive oil and another bottle of canola oil (for the sweet fillings), a packet of dried apricots, a packet of dried figs, some farmer cheese (mistake, doesn’t taste that good; stick with ricotta) and some feta. And some dill and scallions I had at home. Also a lemon or two. I left the fillo in the fridge overnight to thaw slowly the way you’re supposed to, and not the way I usually do (i.e., take the thing out of the wrapper and let it sit an hour on the counter and then wonder why it cracks when I rush to unroll it).

I made the fillings the Sunday morning in a microwaver’s frenzy of immense efficiency:

Nuke a stick of unsalted butter in a bowl, pour it into a snaplock container.
Thaw the spinach on a plate–4 minutes on HIGH. Take it out.
Dump the dried apricots in a bowl with water to cover and a saucer on top–3 minutes. Meanwhile, start squeezing the spinach dry, and I mean dry, in handfuls over the sink. Nothing worse than soggy spanakopita. Except maybe soggy pizza.
Take the apricots out, put in the bowl of figs with the stems cut off, some water and a lid, 3 minutes for them.
Blend the apricots with a little sugar and water and lemon juice to make a thick paste. Get it out of the food processor and pack it in a disposable container with a lid.
Do the same thing for the figs, only no sugar necessary.
Rinse out the food processor, stick the scallions, wild thyme, fresh dill and basil in and chop them fine, drop in the spinach, a fat clove of minced garlic, and the feta. Pack that too.
Grab all the bags with the goods and don’t forget the oils and the butter and the fillings and the extra feta and farmer’s cheese just in case there’s time to make some cheese-only filling there and somebody wants it. …

I hustled, I got to the synagogue kitchen on time, I set up stations around a stainless steel work table–foil sheets at each place, paper bowls with a dab of melted butter and a pour of oil, plastic baggies to go over everyone’s hands instead of pastry brushes, the carefully unrolled fillo under plastic wrap. The oven–on. The fillings–ready to rock. And then I waited. And waited.

An hour really would have been enough time for that class. But none of the kids showed up for the first 20 minutes because it was also the day the photographers were herding all the classes out into the basketball court area for graduation photos. So when they finally straggled in, all eight–and surprisingly, three of them were boys–I made them wash their hands and then set them to work.

The first thing I did was hand out individual sheets of fillo and pointed out that they were nearly as thin and tearable as tissue paper. They were all surprised when they saw it. None of the kids, who’d been cooking all year and who had attended a lot of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, had seen fillo “in the raw”.

I got them started on spanakopita triangles–also known sometimes as bulemas (Greek root found here; you’ve heard of bulimia, right? Didn’t mention that connection, of course. You would never want to get into that with a batch of preteens. Don’t get too disturbed, though. The rough translation as used in Hebrew is “appetizers” or “things to gobble”. Of course, in Israel “bulmus” is also what they call anything like the American after-Thanksgiving shoppers’ frenzy or otherwise a run on the stock market…so much for appetites gone hog wild…)

I naturally thought fillo triangles would be a cinch for the boys especially–you do it the same way you fold a paper football and try not to get caught in class. Only with a little more butter and olive oil involved, and hopefully no punting in the kitchen, because I wasn’t gonna clean it up for them when the spanakopita went flying.

Here came the second generational surprise, though: none of the kids, not even the boys, had any idea how to fold a basic paper football! They’d never done it. Paper airplane? I asked desperately. Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks | Tagged: appetizers, apricots, bulemas, cooking with kids, Desserts, feta cheese, figs, fillo, Greek food, Jewish cooking, mezze, phyllo, spanakopita | Comments Off on Little Green Footballs

Giant favas

Posted on October 28, 2012 by DebbieN

Fresh fava beans are the province of spring. Dried ones–the ultra-large size favas–are pale gigantic beans with a flavor like roast chestnuts, only without the sweet. These are the ones for Greek-style winter stews (gigantes plaki) or, as a friend in Jerusalem makes on cold and rainy December weekends, a very slow-braised stew of giant favas with chicken and vegetables.

Here in Pasadena it’s still hovering in the 90s midday, long after Yom Kippur has come and gone. So there’s no incentive to cook anything for more than 15 minutes at a time if you can possibly help it. And gigantes or giant favas (I’m not absolutely sure they’re the same bean, so for reference–what I’m using are the peeled giant favas, about an inch across) take a very long time to cook through to tenderness, even after soaking overnight. The challenge, actually, is to cook them enough without having them fall apart like overcooked potatoes. Oven-baking or crockpotting would probably work, but it’s hours of time.

So most of the dried-fava recipes I can find are for favas that have crumbled and been puréed for soup or hummus or paté. But the stewed favas–that’s what I wanted. Only I wanted them on their own, meatless, tomato-less, pure, as it were, because I had an idea of marinating them a little for a side dish and serving them room-temperature. Something like marinated artichoke hearts, but subtler.

There are few “slow food fast” shortcuts for this, unless a pressure cooker would work well enough without blasting them to bits. I might have to get one and try it–when everyone’s out of the house, just in case my purple thumb tendencies kick in.

You still need to soak them very thoroughly overnight, a minimum of 12 hours and maybe better, 24 hours (in the fridge) before starting to cook them, because at least two batches of Sadaf peeled giant favas have shown a distinct reluctance to take up water the way most reasonably fresh dried beans do, even though a lot of the beans were split in half. Were these two bags of favas just incredibly old and dried out? Are giant favas just naturally tough? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I have to go with the bags of unpeeled favas instead?–maybe those dry out a little less inside and cook up more tender once you get the peels off (after cold-soaking and before boiling). One can only hope.

And substituting giant lima beans that a lot of Greek cookbooks recommend as a substitute in plaki would obviously give more tender results, plus they don’t require laborious peeling, but the flavor would be pretty different. The giant favas are what I want, and no other.

Nevertheless–once the favas were soaked as best possible and rinsed again, I cooked them partially by microwaving 10 minutes in water to cover by an inch and letting them sit. I didn’t want to do it a second round, as I would for chickpeas, because they had the kind of tough obstinacy that reminded me that microwaving can actually make some cooked beans tougher–black beans in particular. At least the raw bean taste was gone, but they still required 2 hours of simmering gently and partially covered on the stovetop, to become something approaching tender. Frustrating.

Some of them broke up. I think it’s practically inevitable. But some of them were huge and very impressive. Once they were as done as they were going to be, I drained them most of the way.

The marinade I use for microwaved artichoke hearts is just lemon juice, garlic, salt and olive oil–the artichoke hearts donate enough juice as they cook to mellow out everything else a little. Favas–no. Plus I wanted something richer and less strident for the flavoring.

So I pulled a bottle of cheap but dry rosé (for want of chardonnay or the like, and rejecting the ever-present reds so as not to stain the beans) out of the fridge and poured some of it into a frying pan to boil off a little of the alcohol and pick up some of the other marinade flavors: a fat clove of garlic, the juice of a lemon, olive oil and a couple of sprigs of rosemary off the bush I’ve managed not to kill this year. I let this simmer together a few minutes to take the edge off the raw garlic and wine flavors and steep the rosemary a little, and then poured in the boiled-up fava beans and just a little of their broth to simmer a few more minutes before pouring the whole thing out to cool.

A little more olive oil would have been good if I’d had it (the bottle ran out after about a tablespoon)–I was actually hoping it would help soften the beans further but I didn’t really have enough for oil-stewing (the Greek cookbooks I have all recommend about half a cup in a batch of about a pound of dried beans) and I’d have had to stew the thing a lot longer to get anything resembling a silky texture, I suspect. But the flavors permeated the beans very nicely–rosemary has an irreplaceable perfume that even wild thyme doesn’t reach even though that would be pretty good too. Together, the rosemary and wine balance the surface brashness of garlic and lemon and bring out the unusual flavor of the giant favas without the need for salt. It’s good hot, but it’s even better the second day, hot or cooled.

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: bean salads, beans, cooking with wine, favas, gigantes, Greek food, mezze, Middle Eastern food, rosemary, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Giant favas

The Hummus Debate

Posted on July 29, 2010 by DebbieN

Hummus is a highly politicized food these days, a situation most eaters outside Lebanon, and at a guess, most inside as well, consider slightly ridiculous. “Owning” hummus has become a point of national pride for a few higher-ups in Lebanon, which has in the past year or two followed Greece’s feta-labeling strategy and tried to appropriate sole credit for authentic hummus. At its more light-hearted, this struggle for hummus supremacy takes the form of an annual stunt in which chefs produce a hummus bowl almost the size of an Olympic swimming pool (or at least an Olympic-sized wading pool) and the triumphal photo makes the international news. But those who really take the Lebanese official origin issue seriously and grimace whenever hummus is served somewhere else are, as far as I can see, only hurting themselves.

The trouble with demanding official status is that both feta and hummus long predate the borders of the countries trying to claim them. Both are simple enough to make and so consistent from batch to batch that they don’t really exhibit much in the way of “terroir” the way aged cheeses, wines, vinegars and so on might. Feta–equally good, equally real, equally part of the native fare–is made in a lot of places neighboring modern-day Greece. Places like Bulgaria, which don’t have as much political clout in either the EU or the Slow Food organizations, and which don’t get half the international tourism. Also places further away, notably Denmark and France, which still have reasonably large sheep’s milk production. Greece may actually have succeeded for the moment in the food labeling tug-of-war, but it’s made the country look somewhat silly and petulant, unwilling to face the fact that they’ve closed the barn door at least a century after the sheep got out. Will they profit from the exclusive labeling? doubtful–and it might have been better ambassadorship to claim credit for spreading feta’s popularity and offer more recipes and products made with it.

Much to the chagrin of whoever decided in the past couple of years that hummus should be exclusively Lebanese, this simple spread is made and eaten in lots of other countries. In Egypt, it’s made with a half-and-half mixture of favas and chickpeas. And Israel, which is probably the “other country” being targeted most directly by the Lebanese hummus campaign, has eaten, breathed, and slept a more or less chickpeas-only version of hummus as an essential food (along with felafel) for longer than the state has been independent.

Unlike the partisanry in Lebanon (not that Israel has no partisanry of its own), when it comes to food, everyone in Israel–Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Druse–gives credit with a certain degree of pride that hummus is Arab food, especially if they’ve made it themselves rather than trotting down to the corner grocery to buy the bland ready-made version from a vat in the deli at the back.

That’s because everyone likes to eat it. It’s also because being a good host is really important and something of a formal habit and a chance to show off just a little–actually, I think that’s still true all throughout the Middle East. Everyone expects friends and neighbors and friends-of-friends to drop by at a moment’s notice, without invitation, especially on the weekend. The least you can do is have a bag of roasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds and a pot of hideously sweet mint tea to bring out if they show up to schmooze after supper, but in the afternoon, better if you can bring out a platter of pita, vegetables, and a bowl of hummus.

Hummus is simple Arab fare at its best–humble, nutritious, appetizing, and (now that we have food processors) easy to make a lot of so you can bring out a wide platter of it for your guests and drizzle a little olive oil and some za’atar or sumac or cumin or paprika over it for the finishing touch–right before everyone tears pita and dips in. The ceremonial thing is what makes it good hosting and is part of the fun.

Here in the US, most people buy their hummus in little plastic containers at the supermarket–not elegant at all, and a lot of money for what you get. Kind of depressing, even. Look at the ingredient list and it’s as long and discouraging as any other processed food–that’s so it can be shipped nationally and stored for a week or two in case it doesn’t all sell out the first day. Look at the nutrition label and you see highish salt, lowish protein and fiber. It’s been fluffed out with canola oil to stretch the expensive ingredient, tehina (sesame paste), and there’s not so much in the way of chickpeas even though they’re supposed to be the base.

While I’m not so much against the fluffy smooth stuff (it tastes ok, if all you’re expecting is a spoonful or two of party dip), I prefer homemade because it’s denser and more nutritious, with more iron and protein from the chickpeas, something you could eat packed in half a pita for lunch and not be starving within an hour. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, Food Politics, frugality, history, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: appetizers, chickpeas, hummus, Israeli food, Lebanese food, mezze, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern food | 1 Comment »

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

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.

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

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: aubergine, baba ghanouj, eggplant, Jewish cooking, kitchen techniques, mezze, Middle Eastern cooking, vegetable cooking | Comments Off on Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

Dolmas by microwave

Posted on August 7, 2009 by DebbieN

When we first moved to Pasadena 10 years ago, one of my favorite places for Sunday dinners out was Pita! Pita!, a family-run Lebanese restaurant in the “Old Town” section of the city. One of the reasons I loved it was the usual reason to love middle eastern food: the mostly vegetarian mezze were wonderful, and the main dishes were knockouts. Long-cooked lamb, roast chicken, fish grilled or under tehina sauce, vegetable stews with a surprising bite of pineapple in them. Even though I couldn’t eat the meat dishes, I could certainly appreciate them by smell. Everything was modestly priced and generous along with it.

The other reason I loved it was that the family that ran it had made their restaurant the kind of place families went for an old-country kind of Sunday dinner with all the uncles and aunts. Pita! Pita! was housed in one of a row of narrow spaces along Fair Oaks, converted from what I think was once a schoolhouse. The narrowness didn’t stop them from putting a couple of large old-fashioned dining room tables in with the smaller ones for couples. They treated their customers like family, you could sit and eat at a leisurely pace and converse, and we never came away anything less than happy. And certainly never hungry.

Which is why I still miss the place. The family ended up realizing they couldn’t make a go of it without charging astronomical prices or wearing themselves out and decided instead to run a smaller, cafeteria-style lunch spot with fewer and simpler dishes on the main business street. And I can’t blame them at all. The food they serve now–more mezze and fast grilled items–is still as good, but the long-cooked family-style dishes and the leisurely Sunday nights I’ll keep having to miss.

I grew up with hummus, tehina, felafel and tabbouleh, which are Israeli standards too and popular among Jews in the U.S. My mother made them from the dried mixes and cans of prepared tehina when they finally became available in our supermarket. In Israel I learned to make them from scratch, but one thing I didn’t know how to make was stuffed grape leaves or dolmas. My sister had married someone who did and on one weekend visit she showed me the ropes.

I love dolmas but they are not quick to make, not at all. We rolled a loooooottt of grape leaves that afternoon (her husband had bought the econo-jar at a local Arab market), and stuck them tight in a pot, plated down so they didn’t float and unwind, and boiled them with lemon and olive oil for more than an hour. They were wonderful but you would never want to do it on a regular basis!

In the spirit of “what can you cook in a microwave instead of the regular way,” I have gone back and made dolmas at home–in a microwave. It works! You can cook them in a few minutes rather than an hour-plus of boiling and having to top up the water so nothing scorches, and they come out beautifully.

Unfortunately, the microwave, miracle machine though it be, will not help at all with the rolling, which is the hard part. The best I can do is say that microwaving lets you do a few at a time if you feel like it–say, 10-20 dolmas, not 50-100. What you do with the rest of the grape leaves in the econojar is up to you.

Grape leaves come brined in rolls of 20 or so, either a single roll in a skinny jar (Krinos) or a big pickle-jar with four rolls (Cortas, other brands). When you buy them, inspect the rolls and make sure there are no little fluorescent green or yellow spots on them–you’ll know if you see them; capers also get this sometimes. I’m not sure if it’s harmful or not, but I stay away from it. I’d keep the other rolls in the brine in the fridge and make sure to use them up within a month, or else take the rolls and freeze them in ziplock sandwich bags with the air squeezed out–and use them within a couple of months so they don’t get freezer burn.

Dolmas in the Microwave

Roll of brined grape leaves ~ 20-30
1 c raw rice (not “minute rice” or parboiled) or bulgur (cracked wheat or tabbouleh grain, plain)
1 med/big ripe tomato
1/4 onion or 1-2 scallions
1 T dill (a few good sprigs fresh is best if you have fresh)
several sprigs or small handful fresh curly parsley
juice of 1/2 lemon
olive oil and the other half lemon for cooking

1. Partially or almost-completely cook the rice or tabbouleh in the microwave: put it in a pyrex bowl or microwaveable container, cover with ~1/2-3/4 inch of water, microwave covered on HIGH for ~2-2.5 minutes, let sit and absorb the water several minutes until nearly done, drain excess moisture.

2. While the grain is cooking, rinse off the roll of grape leaves and then soak them in a big Pyrex bowl to get rid of some of the salt. Change the water once. [Note: traditional recipes say soak the grape leaves an hour in cold water. Some others say pour boiling water over them and let them soak. If you want to split the difference in a microwaveable way, you could rinse them, put them in the Pyrex bowl with water to cover, nuke 2-3 minutes on HIGH and then change the water.]

3. Blend the tomato, onion or scallion, herbs and lemon juice in a food processor and mix with the drained rice or bulgur–include the tomato juice. Let cool enough to handle.

4. Stuff the grape leaves–this is the hard part. Take a stack of grape leaves and drain them on a plate. Cut off the stems carefully without tearing the leaves. Lay out one leaf vein-side up and stem end toward you. Put a spoonful of the filling–not more–on the leaf right above where the stem joint was. Roll the leaf over it–tightly but carefully so you don’t tear–and tuck the side leaves over it halfway through, then keep rolling away from you. Place each stuffed grape leaf, flap edge down, in a tight layer in a microwaveable container or dish.

5. When you’re done rolling (nothing says you have to do the whole thing in one go if you get sick of it after 10 or you just want 10, just put the leftover filling and the grape leaves in the fridge) pour a little water carefully over the layer of grape leaf rolls. Maybe a quarter-inch of water. Squeeze the other half lemon over the whole thing, and drizzle a little olive oil over it– maybe a couple of tablespoons worth. Cover the dish or container and microwave on high 2-3 minutes for 10, maybe 3-4 minutes for 20+. Check one for doneness–careful, it’ll be pretty hot–you want the leaves tender and the grain cooked through. Maybe go another minute if you need to.

Let them cool and chill in the fridge. Serve with tzatziki, raita, tehina, or other yogurt-based dip.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Grains, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: appetizers, dolmades, dolmas, Greek food, Israeli food, Lebanese food, mezze, microwave cooking, slow food, stuffed grape leaves | Comments Off on Dolmas by microwave

How to Nuke an Eggplant

Posted on July 12, 2009 by DebbieN

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: aubergine, baba ghanouj, eggplant, eggplant parmigiana, involtini, Mediterranean diet, melanzana, mezze, microwave cooking, microwaved eggplant, Middle Eastern cooking, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on How to Nuke an Eggplant

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Little Green Footballs

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

Giant favas

The Hummus Debate

Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

Dolmas by microwave

How to Nuke an Eggplant

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Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Little Green Footballs

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

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Giant favas

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The Hummus Debate

Share this:

Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

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Dolmas by microwave

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How to Nuke an Eggplant

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About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

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