Middle Eastern cooking | Slow Food Fast

Persian-ish grill ideas for Purim

Posted on March 16, 2022 by DebbieN

Lentil-stuffed Anaheim chile with zucchini, tomatoes and red onion in a Persian-style vegetarian platter grilled in the toaster oven. — *Microwave-to-toaster-oven version*

Last year our synagogue signed up for a catered Persian grill dinner (served takeout-style for pickup) from a restaurant on the West Side of LA, and this year they’re doing it again from a restaurant with kosher meat options. Last year, we weren’t sure so we went with a vegetarian option that turned out to be a little bleak–just grilled but dry unsauced vegetables, including some very-middle-American-style broccoli and babycut carrots that looked like they’d just been thrown in with the more traditional eggplant, pepper, zucchini, onion and tomato. The trays were filled out with huge heaps of bright-yellow basmati rice and a little tub of fesenjan sauce–toasted ground walnuts cooked down with grated onion and pomegranate molasses. No actual protein, though, so I pan-browned triangles of tofu to go with it. It was still all pretty bland, though, except for the charred tomato and pasilla pepper and onion.

Even though we’re going to have a meat version tonight–presumably better, I hope!–before the Megilla reading, the story of Queen Esther is very specific about one of her virtues. Unlike all the other girls who were hauled up to Ahashverosh’s palace for a year of preparation for a beauty contest (only, as with most, without a desirable prize). Most of the contestants dined on all the delicacies of the palace kitchen, but Esther refused any of the expensive meats and ate chickpeas instead. She didn’t tell anyone she was Jewish, but she didn’t eat the meat, claiming she was in mourning. It may have been a factor in why she was chosen as queen–she wasn’t being a glutton while the getting was good.

In Esther’s time, Ahashverosh had allowed his wicked vizier Haman to convince him to send out a decree allowing anyone to attack the Jews. But once Esther exposed Haman’s plot and her own Jewishness, he couldn’t cancel his own decree, so he sent out a second decree allowing the Jews to arm themselves in their own defense.

The celebration of Purim, while joyous and relieved, maybe a little exaggerated, is always mixed with acknowledgement of poverty and violence around us; this year most notably caused by the horror Putin has committed in Ukraine. The parallels are pretty harsh and very timely; there are always people like Haman and Ahashverosh willing to do harm or make excuses. So I have mixed feelings about meat vs. vegetarian for Purim, and about celebration in the midst of and despite the everpresent harsh realities.

The best I can do is to say that yes, especially now, we need to commemorate and to celebrate the triumph of good over evil–but without losing perspective or forgetting. May we have more people like Esther and Mordechai–be people more like them, people who step up. And in the meantime, remember to give tzedakah and g’milut hasadim–not charity, but the justice of providing for those in need. This is the season for that too.

Back to food and cooking:

One thing I’ve been thinking about since last Purim is how to make a somewhat better-tasting vegetarian Persian grill-style platter at home. I did like the restaurant’s grilled vegetables, just not the broccoli and carrot bits that were completely out of place or the tofu I made as a last-ditch effort.

If you have a microwave and a toaster oven or a nonstick frying pan with a lid, you can do something good and vegetarian fairly quickly and get some of the vibe without a lot of work. And grilling will improve winter tomatoes, onions, zucchini, (full-size, sliced) carrots, cauliflower, whatever you have where you are.

You can make a tray of quick-grilled vegetables as a side dish, or you can take the long, stuffable peppers and put in rice-and-tomato, as for dolmas (stuffed grape leaves), grillable white cheese like panela or queso fresco plus a sprinkle of nigella seed or thyme and some minced onion, or my personal and higher-protein/flavor choice, lentil hashu as for stuffed baby eggplants and mehshi basal (stuffed onions), which are Syrian Jewish, but adaptable and delicious and not too far off. The lentil and rice stuffing is flavored with allspice and cinnamon and it grills up nicely, especially in a nonstick pan with a bit of olive oil to create a light, crispy, char on the surface. It also makes light, delicate felafel-like fritters.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, history, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, Jewish cooking, Jewish holidays, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern cooking, recipes | Comments Off on Persian-ish grill ideas for Purim

Microwave-Pickled Eggplant for Felafel

Posted on June 20, 2021 by DebbieN

What goes into a classic felafel pita? Tomato/cucumber diced salad, yes. Chopped or shredded cabbage or Greek-style lahanosalata–maybe. Hummus and tehina–of course. Dab of z’khug, harissa, salat turqi and other medium-hot red pepper condiments, up to you. Olives? if Greek-style and not the black rubbery cheap flavorless American ones from a can. “Chipsim” (aka, chips or French fries)–not my thing but okay as long as they’re fresh and crisp, not soggy or lukewarm. Hilbe–a sour fenugreek-based sauce something like mustard dressing.

And pickled eggplants. The true pickles for felafel, if you ask me. You can probably find them in cans in Arab and Armenian groceries or online, but they’re pretty full-on brined and have a lot of the same deficits of both commercial cucumber-type pickles and canned vegetables. Lot of salt, a bit metallic from the cans, and a little less than fresh. Plus with cans, you have to either use them up all in one go (at your huge felafel party) or else store the unused pickles in a fresh nonreactive container in the fridge. Which isn’t necessarily that big a sacrifice, if you’re really into them, have a lot of takers to share them with, and/or are planning to eat leftover felafel for the rest of the week (month?) But fresh-made eggplant pickles are a lot better if you just want them for a meal or two, or you want to control the salt level so you don’t wake up the next day with swollen ankles and fingers like cucumbers.

Classic pickles are made with the little finger-sized eggplants like the ones I used for Syrian stuffed eggplants a few years ago or else with long, thin eggplants sliced crosswise. But regular large ones will also work, cut into bite-size pieces.

If you have fresh eggplants of whatever size, you can pickle them in one of two ways, depending on your patience level. The first is your basic half-sour pickles fermented in a couple of days to a week in a mason or canning jar on a counter–much the same as for half-sour kosher dill pickles or pickled green tomatoes but maybe without the dill. When I lived in Israel back in the ’80s, I was surprised to see jars of eggplant fingers pickling on many people’s home kitchen counters. It seemed so Mediterranean-idyllic to me, coming straight out of a mainstream college town in the days before wholesale foodieism. For eggplant, as for the green tomatoes and cucumbers, use a standard salt and distilled vinegar brine that you’ve boiled and cooled, and pour it over the eggplant chunks and flavorings in the jar. Instead of dill, throw some well-scrubbed organic lemon slices and small whole dried hot peppers into the jar with the halved garlic cloves and whole coriander seed, pack the raw eggplant slices in tightly, and pour the brine over before capping the jar and letting it sit to ferment a couple of days. You’re not going to process these in a hot water bath, so keep them in the fridge and use them within a week or so.

However…there is a much faster way to get to pickled eggplant heaven in about 5 minutes–microwave marinating. If you just want a few right now, you want eggplant pickles that taste fresher and have lower salt, or you’ve never tasted them before and you’re not sure what you’ll think of them, a microwave will get you a reasonably small taster batch in about 5 minutes flat, and you can make them in a snaplock container that goes straight to the fridge once it’s cooled down. The taste and texture are both surprisingly authentic, based on my last two tries.

Why would you bother pickling an eggplant instead of cooking it, anyway? Well…I had a big eggplant that I hadn’t gotten around to using for a week. It was developing soft brown spots in places and I wasn’t sure was really going to make it much longer if I didn’t get on and do something with it, but I thought it was probably now too tough for straight eating–eggplants get tougher and sometimes more bitter inside as they age. So I cut off the spots on the peel and started slicing the rest into small wedges to see if I could do a quick version of eggplant pickles in the microwave and get somewhere close.

I’ve done it before with mild hot peppers (and occasionally, accidentally, with peppers that turned out not to be mild) and sometime this past year I tried it with a couple of green tomatoes too, despite having made pretty good deli-style pickled green tomatoes the official way a few years ago. The microwave tomatoes came out basically identical to the two-day jar-fermented version, which surprised me. So I can say with confidence that this microwave method seems mostly good.

But here’s the tricky bit.

When you microwave in a brine, you have to work out how soft or crisp you want the vegetables to be, and play around with the microwaving times and what you put in when so that you cook the vegetables just enough and let the brine penetrate, but not so much as to end up with limp mush. The hot vinegar and/or lemon juice will also “cook” and discolor some vegetables more than others. Commercial operations offset these and other problems by adding sodium metabisulfite, alum, and other tricky preservatives and texturizers at various stages, but they’re not easy to obtain for home use and can be dangerous if mishandled. I’m pretty sure they don’t actually improve the taste.

It’s both easier and a lot safer–not to mention cheaper–to play around a bit and figure out a microwave method that gets you where you want to be or at least close. Because you can. Of course you can.

Here are a couple of strategies for microwave-pickling depending on the kind of vegetable you have and what texture you’re aiming for, and then we’ll look at what I did with the eggplant slices.

Microwave Marinating Combinations

Do you want to microwave the veg and brine ingredients together, all in one step, and let the brine cook the vegetable? That works well for things like marinated artichoke hearts or sweet and sour red cabbage. You could do that as a first try and see if you like the texture, adding a bit of time if it’s not cooked enough for you or cutting back the next time if the veg is too soft. Easy enough.

But you can also adjust which part cooks more, the veg or the brine. You know at some point you’re going to have vegetables in a container with brine and a lid, but the order and degree of cooking are up to you.

Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cooking, food, Middle Eastern cooking, recipes | 3 Comments »

Persian Posh and Jewish Soul: Two Veg-Friendly Cookbooks for Spring

Posted on April 30, 2015 by DebbieN

"The New Middle Eastern Vegetarian" (aka "Veggiestan" in the UK) by Sally Butcher, cover photo from amazon.co.uk

"Jewish Soul Food: From Minsk to Marrakesh" by Janna Gur. Cover photo from amazon.com

Passover week didn’t exactly go the way I’d hoped, with loads of new vegetable dishes to play with and experiments in microwave gastronomy that would wow the most cynical reader…

After the optimistic start with the chocolate almond torte and the microwave shakshouka for one, I suddenly caught a bug–my husband caught it first, suffered a day or so, got better and then kindly passed it to me, and I ended up sick for the better part of the week. We all agree we got it from a kid he was sitting next to at seder. Now that our kid’s a teenager, we’re no longer used to it. Clearly we’ve gone soft.

So I was–shall we say–less than enthusiastic about cooking the last week or so, and ended up with lots of ideas that stayed in my head while I stayed in bed, attempting to keep up on tea, rice, poached eggs and applesauce. And feeling really embarrassed that every time I opened the fridge and saw all the beautiful vegetables I’d bought for the week, I peered at them suspiciously–how much trouble would they cause me? Was it really a crappy virus or was it maybe secretly food poisoning, even though everyone else was able to eat? Maybe tomorrow–and closed the fridge door again and groaned. It took a couple of extra days to start looking at vegetables with any enthusiasm at all.

This, I thought, is what most of the country thinks about fresh vegetables if a dolled-up superstar chef isn’t holding one on the cover of a glossy magazine (or even if he is). Maybe with a little less queasiness or dizziness than I experienced, but with that lurking suspicion that vegetables have dirt on them, that you have to wash them off and then cut them up and do something to them, that they’re not sterile and wrapped in plastic for your protection, and that it’s all too much bother. What a lousy, paranoid way to live.

So anyway, now that I’m better the vegetables are looking good again, and the (four or five) leftover matzah boxes have been relegated to a top shelf for sometime when I’m not sick of them and want to experiment a bit for next year.

Two bright and sun-filled new (or newish, anyway) cookbooks that make lavish and hearty use of vegetables were languishing on my desk for the entire week of Passover (and two weeks before that, when I was too busy to do more than look at them wistfully). Sally Butcher’s Veggiestan is a collection of pan-Middle Eastern vegetarian recipes that centers on her husband’s family Persian cuisine and their experience as the proprietors of a Persian specialty grocery in London. Jewish Soul Food: From Minsk to Marrakesh is Israeli food writer/editor Janna Gur’s second major English-language cookbook, and it focuses on Jewish “grandma” food from all the cultures Israel is home to.

Both books run something along the lines of Yotam Ottolenghi’s approach to food–appealing, vegetable-filled, exotic, and fun to cook and eat. But the food is generally simpler and homier, more traditional and with fewer trendy/haute touches or UK-specific ingredients like salsify or seabeans that you just can’t find most places in the US. Butcher and Gur each have a foot in both professional and home cooking, which may make the difference. The recipes here are not chefly so much as cookable. Eminently cookable, and they make me want to run right out and try so many things (especially if I can stuff any of the steps into the microwave) that I’m just going to have to get them both and give back my overdue library copies.

The authors share an approach to traditional and modern Middle Eastern food that is enthusiastic, knowledgeable, ecumenical and–I’m not sure how to say it exactly, but neighborly comes close. Reading these books is like hanging out in the farmer’s market and the kitchen with a friend who knows how to make all the dishes your grandmother might have made but never showed you.

Veggiestan is the original 2011 UK title of Butcher’s mid-sized cookbook, now out in trade paperback, but the publishers thought that title would be too controversial for the US (land of “freedom Continue reading →

Filed under: books, holiday cooking, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cookbooks, food, Jewish cooking, Middle Eastern cooking, Persian cooking, vegetarian | Comments Off on Persian Posh and Jewish Soul: Two Veg-Friendly Cookbooks for Spring

Tehina goes with fish

Posted on November 6, 2014 by DebbieN

tilapia pan-fried with tehina, hummus, onions and curry spices

Two large tilapia fillets pan-fried with a hummus, tehina and yogurt coating. The fillets pick up a lattice of browned onions and curry spices when you flip them over.

This is no great surprise if you like Middle Eastern food, I suppose, but tehina or sesame paste is not just for hummus, felafel and eggplant (or roast butternut squash, for fans of Yotam Ottolenghi). It’s also a great match for white-fleshed fishes such as sole, red snapper and tilapia, because it’s rich-tasting and smoky, goes really well with cumin-type spice combinations, and can be dressed up or down.

But despite its richness (it is an oily paste like peanut butter, after all) it has very little saturated fat, mostly mono- and poly-unsaturated fats (the heart-healthy kinds) and it has enough flavor that a little goes a long way. So if you like fish and have a jar of tehina handy and some garlic (a must) and a few basic spices like cumin on your shelf, you can take advantage a couple of different ways without a lot of work.

I’ve already tried Poopa Dweck’s recipe for cold whitefish salad (much like tuna salad, but made with lighter-textured cooked white fish) where tehina, lemon juice, cumin, paprika and garlic stand in for the more usual mayonnaise, sour cream or yogurt in conventional western versions. The basic version was very good, even though I cut the quantities severely for home use and didn’t bother making sliced-cucumber scales to lay out over the whitefish salad (because I’m not that arty just for us). Although maybe if I do a brunch sometime later this year I’ll “scale up” in both senses…

More often, though, I cook tilapia as a standard hot weeknight dinner. It’s relatively inexpensive for fish, lighter and much quicker to cook than chicken, can be served with dairy in kosher homes like mine, and it’s pretty adaptable. But as with skinless, boneless chicken breasts, it can get a little boring if you don’t do something new with it once in a while.

One of the dishes I recall fondly and still miss from the Pita!Pita! Lebanese restaurant when it was still on Fair Oaks in Old Town Pasadena (must be something like 10 years ago now!) was sole fillets baked under tehina sauce. May Bsisu gives a recipe for two similar dishes (samak harra b’tehina and tagen al-samak) in The Arab Table, which I highly recommend. I think I mentioned this book in passing in a post about making your own yogurt in the microwave, but it really deserves more attention.

I think the elegant casseroles of fish baked in tehina sauce are worth doing for a larger crowd and with more time than I usually have. But I’ve always thought the flavors would be good in a quick frying-pan version with tilapia too. The coating in this version is a mixture of hummus and a thick Greek yogurt/tehina/garlic spread I had originally made for pita and vegetables (and uncooked, it’s pretty good for that). Because of the hummus, the coating cooks to a breading on individual fillets rather than remaining saucy, but the flavors are really good and it takes maybe 20 minutes, including browning the onions well. I tried this twice last week and it was terrific both times. Continue reading →

Filed under: fish, nuts, sauces and condiments | Tagged: fish recipes, low-sodium cooking, May Bsisu, Middle Eastern cooking, quick main dishes, tehina | Comments Off on Tehina goes with fish

The “other” moussaka–eggplant and chickpea stew

Posted on December 10, 2013 by DebbieN

It’s been a fuller month than I expected, with a lot of travel and the unlooked-for complications of Thanksgiving and Chanukah falling on the same week. Supposedly we don’t get to do that again for another 77,000 years or so.

Most of the food features about the “Thanksgivukkah” mashup this year have been bemused, amused, and imaginative only in the sense of suggesting (always) latkes and sufganiyot (doughnuts) for the Thanksgiving menu. Not in replacement of any other starches or desserts, you understand. They mean in addition to. Forgive me if I can’t dig it, but I don’t think either holiday really benefits from the “double your starches, double your fun” idea.

We had a great long weekend up with my in-laws and family in San Jose; and what was on the table? A pretty decent meal by any standards, traditional or California modern.

Thanksgiving 2013-Northern California style

At my in-laws’, 5 minutes before showtime. A lot more green on this table than I remember as a kid. It could only be an improvement, and believe it or not, most of the broccoli got snapped up with the fabulous mustard garlic dressing (not yet on the table)

Turkey (kosher, and cooked by accident upside down because my in-laws stuck it in three entire shopping bags and couldn’t tell which end was up–but it came out better than most of their other attempts, so they’re doing it again next year on purpose–I highly recommend it). A little stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy for those who insisted, which wasn’t us; cranberry orange sauce, a stellar Georgia pecan pie among the desserts. But the rest of it was California-conscious; farro salad with chestnuts and mushrooms, a roasted red-squash-and-onion platter with whole cloves of roasted garlic strewn around, a big green spinach and fennel salad with endive and pomegranate seeds, and my contribution, an impressively large platter of very green, just-steamed broccoli with a spicy mustard garlic dressing that, and I may say so, rocked the Casbah and provided the necessary Jewish influence.

Not just because of the olive oil-at-Chanukah factor–which would have been enough for me and was plenty symbolic–but for the balance of a big blob of sharp spicy brown mustard with a big fat clove of garlic. Plus red wine vinegar, olive oil, and a little white wine. . . whisk and taste, whisk and taste. When it’s just sharp enough, still thick but can be drizzled, tastes good and has just the right degree of excessive garlic without going to Gilroy (which, btw, is only about half an hour outside of San Jose and holds a surprisingly popular garlic festival every summer), you know it’s done.

The broccoli itself was a little undercooked for me but others insisted it had to be still crunchy to avoid killing the little green vitamins–a new trend in Califoodian philosophy, at least northern Califoodia. It was in the San Jose Mercury News that week or something. But the garlic mustard dressing made up for all that nutritional selfrighteousness and helped the turkey no end as well. Cranberries are well and good and I love them, but they’re no substitute. I maintain [talmudically, in question form]: if there’s no garlic, is it really food?

But with a week of too much food and travel and lectures on nutritional trendiness aside, I find myself thinking, do I really need to be thinking so much about food? Southern California makes it easy to eat well with very little effort–even with very little money, as long as you shop at the local Armenian or Latino markets for vegetables and stick to the unbranded or store-brand and whole foods only.

However…although it was about 85 degrees out when we came home to Pasadena, the temps quickly dropped and have been in the 50s all week, with and without drizzle (yes, you can pity us sarcastically if you want to. They don’t sell coats of any worth better than a sweatshirt here, so to us it’s cold). I realized it was time for a stew. With, obviously, garlic.

Most people think of moussaka as the Greek eggplant-lamb casserole with béchamel topping. But a much simpler vegetarian eggplant stew with chickpeas, onion and tomatoes is also called moussaka (also found on the web as “musakk’ah”). It stems from Lebanon and is popular throughout the Middle East. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, holiday cooking, soup, Vegetabalia | Tagged: eggplant, food, Middle Eastern cooking, recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on The “other” moussaka–eggplant and chickpea stew

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

Posted on September 30, 2011 by DebbieN

I did it. It was 90+ degrees outside yesterday afternoon and felt a lot hotter inside when I started cranking the oven to try this dish right away rather than wait for the weekend, but I’m just no good with delayed gratification.

If I have the mini-eggplants and I have the quinces and I have the tamarind concentrate (homemade! two days ago! it’s practically crying out to be used already!) and I have the “hashu” filling for the vegetables sitting in the fridge smelling wonderful, then it just doesn’t matter that Rosh Hashanah dinner is in what, maybe 3 hours, and I still haven’t braided the challot, to say nothing of baked them. Obviously I’ve gotta try this extra-credit dish out RIGHT NOW.

Actually, I figured the house was going to be heating up anyway once I started baking the challot, so why not get it all over with at once?

There was a more serious reason to try it. Today in services I was still thinking about Dweck’s book and her recounting of her parents’ horror in 1947, when, about to return from a vacation in Europe, they learned the government back home had started massacring whole Jewish communities in reaction to the announcement that the UN had accepted Israel as a Jewish state.

The Syrian Jewish community fled wherever they could–just as my family did under the pogroms in the Ukraine back in the 1880s and 1920s. Dweck maintains that the reception the Syrian Jews got in the US from those of us who were already here was so aloof–they didn’t speak Yiddish, they didn’t look the same, they did a few things differently for kashrut and prayers–that her community kept to themselves ever after.

I can believe it, unfortunately–the period right after World War II and the Holocaust was one of paranoia and circling the wagons for American Ashkenazim.

Eastern and Western Jews had similar discomfort with each other in postwar Europe. Reading between the lines a little in Claudia Roden’s and Colette Rossant’s memoirs, the two, who had just lost everything, thought their new Ashkenazi neighbors were cold and inhospitable and indifferent to their exile; the Ashkenazi neighbors and relatives, meanwhile, thought the wealthy young Egyptian arrivals were horribly spoiled and indifferent to the European disaster they had just missed. Altogether, the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi communities were in closer touch before World War I than they were after the 1940s.

I can only hope that now, 60 or 70 years on, we have more in common and more regard for each other, no matter where we came from. Israel’s great mix of cultures has been a good influence, even though it originated in hardship, and perhaps today we are in better shape to appreciate what we have in common than we have been for nearly a century.

When I look through Dweck’s family’s photos, I see so many people who look astonishingly like several members of my family–my dad and my sister especially. The dignified lady presiding at the seder table on the front cover is a shockingly exact adult version of a girl I knew from my synagogue’s youth group–it’s the sturdy mouth and chin and the set of the eyes, certainly, but also the irrepressibly thick and curly hair (the 1920s formal chignon has it all over my friend’s 1970s braids, which took her hours to corral her hair into). The formal photographs of families in the 1920s, all the daughters dressed beautifully but in the same fabric the mother is wearing, sailor suits on the boys, stern dignified expressions all–I’m pretty sure each of my grandmothers had at least one of those in her collection. The 1930s-era engagement portrait with pearls and bobbed hair–so modern! Pin it up next to the one of my dad’s parents, who married in 1939 and looked so incredibly naive and young then. The family gatherings at Pesach, grandma presiding over the white lace tablecloth and all the seated cousins glancing behind them at the camera from over their shoulders–there’s probably one or two with my mother as a toddler on someone’s lap in Brooklyn and another of her as a teen, whipping her glasses off and blinking myopically for the photo. It could be any of our families. It could have been us in Syria and Egypt and Turkey, it could have been them in the Ukraine or Germany or Poland. We none of us have entirely safe histories, and none of us are entirely separate.

In any case, Dweck’s book is important to me not only for capturing her community’s traditions, tastes and history but for reaching out to the rest of us and giving us a chance to share it, compare it with our own, and reconsider what it means to be part of the Jewish world now.

So–and this is not to trivialize but to explain, since we sometimes live and remember through food, especially at the holidays–it was a great time to try out a challenging dish (challenging for me, anyway) from her book and serve it last night to my family for Erev Rosh Hashanah. I cook from scratch, I cook a lot, but I’ve never really done the legendary great-aunts-at-Pesach kind of slow cooking where everyone groans in pleasure and declares “nobody does it like this anymore” when they taste it. I’ve only once cooked a whole turkey, and I’ve rarely tried anything else that took more than an hour and a half to cook. It’s a transformative experience, one that teaches me a lot about my great-aunts and great-grandmothers, both in the shtetls with the wood-fueled pripitschoks and communal ovens, and here in America with modern kitchens and big lace-covered tables. Trying this long-cooked dish gave me the chance to experience both my family’s past celebrations and Dweck’s at the same time.

To my very great pleasure, her recipe worked the way it was supposed to on the first try and tasted like the effort was worth it, even though her instructions are pretty simple and brief. That’s a huge achievement.

So–if you’re ready for this, keep reading–otherwise, glance at the pictures and skip to the bottom…

The “Stuffed Eggplants with Quince” Experience

First of all, let me just say that I LOVE my local Armenian corner grocers for a lot of reasons, but the fact that they have all the ingredients for Dweck’s dishes (other than kosher meat, that is) is a big, big plus.

I would have tried microwaving–and I still will–instead of a 2-hour braise, but I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to taste, whether microwaving would cook the raw rice in the filling well enough, and how the sauce was supposed to interact with the stuffing and the eggplants. I knew from a previous hard-luck experience that quinces don’t do especially well (or even well at all) in the microwave and really need long stewing under conventional heat to get tender and turn bronzy pink and sweet. So all in all, I decided following the directions in Aromas of Aleppo might be the wiser course for a first try. Even though, from my usual 15-minutes-tops perspective on conventional-heat cooking, Poopa Dweck’s method is glacially, almost outrageously, slow.

Basically, you core the baby eggplants, stuff them with hashu (beef-and-rice filling, rice and tomatoes, or in my case lentils-and-rice), and layer them in a saucepan with quince slices. Then you dilute some tamarind concentrate and add a bit of sugar and salt, pour the sauce over the pan and heat for 10 minutes on the stove until the eggplants start to sweat, add water to come about 3/4 of the way up , simmer half an hour to reduce the liquid and cook the rice in the filling, then transfer to the oven to braise covered for about 40 minutes and then uncovered for another 30. It’s a lot like making brisket, actually.

Dweck gives two allspice-laden recipes for the filling, one for ground beef with rice, the other a rice-and-tomato filling that’s close to what I use for dolmas. I opted to follow the ground beef recipe but substitute an equal weight of cooked green lentils for the meat and add a little garlic. It would work, I was pretty sure, and in fact it turned out to be the best, most delicious part of this recipe–which, skipping to the punchline, was pretty terrific and worthwhile, even for the work Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Aromas of Aleppo, Jewish cooking, lentils, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern cooking, Poopa Dweck, quinces, Rosh Hashanah, stuffed eggplant, stuffed onions, Syrian Jewish cooking, tamarind | 2 Comments »

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Posted on September 28, 2011 by DebbieN

I was born halfway between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so on any given year, I could be stuck eating honeycake or none at all on my birthday. I think I’ve had maybe two actual birthday parties in my life. It’s a concept my daughter, born in June, doesn’t get.

But occasionally I luck out–and this year was one of the best. My husband asked what I wanted and I had a real answer–a cookbook I’ve been lusting after at the library and that costs only slightly more than my probable library fines if I don’t return it.

So this is it–feast your eyes, I’ll turn the pages:

And this is the project that sold me on it:

Stuffed Eggplant with Quince

Poopa Dweck, a cousin by marriage to Claudia Roden, has edited the New York Syrian Jewish community’s version of a sisterhood cookbook (every synagogue in America’s sisterhood seems to have put out at least one of those) for something like 20 years, only people in her community actually used it frequently. My birthday gift is the 2007 culmination of Dweck’s experience, and it’s just a very beautiful cookbook to leaf through–visually but also for the possibility that when you try the dishes, they’re actually going to work.

It doesn’t take much reading for me to realize that despite the unfamiliarity of some of the flavors–allspice in meat stuffings, tamarind-based sauces–this is the best kind of traditional Jewish home cooking, the kind that has your favorite great-aunts outdoing each other for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and other big celebrations. So, somewhat exotic in flavoring but utterly familiar in spirit. (And actually, as I discovered in another Syrian Jewish cookbook, A Fistful of Lentils, by Jennifer Felicia Abadi, a few dishes, like stuffed cabbage with a sweet-and-sour sauce, and manti, a kind of ravioli, are pretty similar to Ashkenazi holishkes and kreplach.)

Like all Jewish great-aunt dishes for the holidays, this dish of stuffed eggplants and quinces comes with two required homework items: the beef and rice stuffing, and tamarind concentrate. The beef I’m not worried about–my first try on this is going to be vegetarian, because I’m not planning on heading out to the kosher butchers in the Valley. I can use a green lentil and rice filling that I already know will taste fine with those flavorings of allspice and cinnamon and onion. Maybe a hit of garlic too, and maybe a bit less salt than for the beef–as I discovered a few weeks ago, with the green lentil sausages, lentils don’t hide the salt flavor as much as beef might.

The other item, tamarind concentrate, turns out to be inexpensive but somewhat unlovely to make–though still something of an adventure. Especially for a blog called Slow Food Fast.

Here’s what’s on page 42 of Aromas of Aleppo for how to work the tamarind pulp into something that will give up its flavor to a sauce:

Poopa Dweck's Aromas of Aleppo--instructions for making tamarind concentrate

Working the tamarind pulp

Now, I’m not all that squeamish, but bleaaghhh. First ya gotta soak the stuff overnight, then ya gotta get in there and mish around–I dunno. I decided to speed it up where I could…

I thought about the little 1-lb. brick of pressed seedless tamarind pulp I’d bought from my Armenian greengrocers for this dish. It just seemed like a tougher version of dried prunes or apricots, which I usually soak up successfully enough in a few minutes by heating them with water in the microwave. Would it work here or would it ruin the flavor? I cut off a chunk, submerged it in water in a microwaveable bowl, and tried it.

Five minutes of microwaving, covered, plus about 20 minutes sitting time–it was definitely done. And really, really incredibly tart, a surprise given tamarind’s distinctly plummy aroma. Success! But no wonder they call it “ou^c” (pronounced OO-rgh, according to Dweck)–that was my immediate reaction when I tasted a tiny sip. It’s THAT sour. My second reaction was that I should probably say Shehekheyanu–the blessing for any new venture, especially for holidays and the first taste of a new fruit in the year.

I realized only afterward that I should have done the whole brick while I was at it–I was about to discover why Dweck calls for preparing three pounds of pulp at a time, not a couple of ounces.

Next step–squishing the pulp in the water to extract as much flavor as possible before filtering through cheesecloth and reextracting the pulp left behind in fresh water…no. Just no. I am not a cheesecloth girl–it never, never cuts neatly, even with Fiskars shears.

So, I was thinking, I have a microwave for a reason. I also decided I have a food processor for a reason, and this is definitely it. I stirred once with a fork first to make sure there really weren’t any pits in there, as advertised on the package front. Then I poured it all into the food processor, and gave it a whirl. That worked too. I seemed to be on a roll with the speed-it-up-immensely daydream.

Filtration–I’ve used overlapping coffee filters in a colander whenever I make paneer in the microwave, and it worked pretty well here too–maybe better than Dweck’s photos, which show a cloudy filtrate coming through the cheesecloth. Mine was clear and amber–maybe too clear? Was it going to taste authentic without the silty stuff? I could only hope. It sure was sour, even dilute as it was. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Aromas of Aleppo, Jewish cooking, lentils, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern cooking, Poopa Dweck, quince, Rosh Hashanah, stuffed eggplant, Syrian Jewish cooking, tamarind, vegetarian cooking | 3 Comments »

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

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

Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Persian-ish grill ideas for Purim

Microwave-Pickled Eggplant for Felafel

Persian Posh and Jewish Soul: Two Veg-Friendly Cookbooks for Spring

Tehina goes with fish

The “other” moussaka–eggplant and chickpea stew

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

How to Nuke an Eggplant

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

Blog Stats

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

What's cooking

Blog Stats