Turkish Feast: Baba Ganoush

Can I be honest here? I really wanted to make Baba Ganoush for Turkish feast, for one reason and ONLY one reason: I fricking love the name of this dish. I've had it in Mediterranean restaurants before and, though I can't exactly recall what it tastes like, I know I've never been impressed by it. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't delicious either. But it's SO FUN to SAY! Try it: Baba Ganoush. BABA GANOUSH! You can't not love it.

Also, eggplants are really pretty, and I've never had the opportunity to try cooking with them before either. But I'd love to have them all over my kitchen. Or maybe just have a big pool full of eggplants, like those ball pits when you were a kid, but eggplants instead of balls, smooth, dark, purple eggplants, rolling in them, swimming naked in a sea of... well, you get the idea. I think eggplants are one of the cooler-looking berries (yeah, that's right, I said BERRIES) I've ever encountered.

So I was really excited to try my hand at some Baba Ganoush.

Most of the reading I did on cooking the eggplant suggested that it should be roasted on the grill, to bring out the smoky flavor that is a part of the dish. Unfortunately it was pouring rain all day, so grilling was a bit out of the question. (I'm not THAT dedicated to my craft.) I roasted mine in the oven at 500 degrees for about half an hour, then turned on the broiler and stuck them under for 10 minutes. Theoretically the skin was supposed to char and turn black, and maybe that would have happened if I'd had the guts to leave them under long enough, but I didn't want to overcook them so I took them out. Next time I'll be braver and stick it out for at least five more minutes before I lose my nerve!


Not charred, kind of... squishy.

Once they were roasted, I needed to let them cool. I got a bit nervous at this point, thinking I didn't really have any experience with eggplant innards, and by golly they seemed pretty squishy, and how did I know if I was doing this right? So I posted my uncertainty to facebook, calling for help, and my friend Chip came through with the best help of all: a Good Eats video clip! Yes, my Food Boyfriend Alton Brown to the rescue once again. It hadn't even occurred to me to see if Alton had ever done an episode on eggplant. Well, not only HAD he; he even made Baba Ganoush! Here's the clip if you want to watch it; it really helped me out.



If it weren't for Alton, I would never have known that the inner liquid would make my Baba Ganoush bitter, and that I had to drain the eggplant for about half an hour before mashing it up. I also would never have learned to wrap the eggplants in plastic wrap before squooshing out the innards; this was EXTREMELY helpful because those suckers were really squishy and MESSY. I was able to squoosh out as many innards as I needed, leaving the (not so) charred flesh behind, and getting nothing on my hands. AWESOME. There are so many reasons that I love you, Alton.


wrapped in plastic, ends chopped off, ready to squeeeze them like big tubes of toothpaste!

(For the record? Eggplants? Not nearly as pretty on the inside.)


eggplant innards

One thing my kitchen is lacking is a food processor. I am finding that the more we embark on these Global Feasts, the more I notice the lack of this machine. I'd love to get one, one of these days. But for now, it's me and my trusty blender. Prior to making the Baba Ganoush, I had made some homemade Hummus (which I will detail in a future post!), and that really gave my poor blender a run for its money. So I was worried about the BG, but as it turned out, this went really well in the blender. Cooked eggplant is apparently really mushy; I didn't even have to mash it up. I just tossed it into the blender along with the other ingredients, pulsed a few times, and it was done. Poured out easily and everything. (I happened to have Greek yogurt left over from the previous week; if you don't have any, check out my previous post on how to make your own Greek yogurt!)


The finished product.

I did not use smoked paprika for garnish; I poured a little bit of olive oil on top, and sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and a few bits of parsley. The only reason I left out the paprika is because... I forgot it. By the time I get around to the part where we can EAT the food, I often forget all about garnishing it in my haste to Get It In My Bellah, to be quite honest. But I did garnish it, in this case; I just didn't remember that they recommended a specific spice for the top.


Garnished Baba Ganoush

This turned out REALLY lemony. I would cut down the amount of lemon by half. It wasn't bad, but it did overpower the dish, and I'm pretty sure more of the smoky-eggplant flavor is supposed to come through. Alternately, one could increase the amount of eggplant. Also, instead of honey, I used a bit of Agave Nectar, but I imagine the results are quite similar.

Baba Ganoush

INGREDIENTS
2 medium eggplants (about 1 1/2 pounds)
3 tablespoons tahini
Juice of 2 lemons
2 garlic cloves, crushed
3/4 cup to 4/5 cup Greek-style yogurt
Salt and Pepper, to taste
Honey, to taste
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
Salt, Pepper, and Smoked paprika, for garnish

DIRECTIONS:
Prick the eggplants in a few places with a fork to prevent them from exploding. Cook the eggplant over the flame of a charcoal barbecue or under the broiler until the skin is charred all over and they feel very soft when you press them. Alternatively, you can place them on a foil-lined baking sheet and roast them in your oven set on its highest heat setting for about 45-55 until soft.

When cool enough to handle, peel and drop them into a strainer or colander with small holes. Press out as much of the water and juices as possible. (My Food Boyfriend, Alton Brown, says to let them drain for half an hour or you'll end up with bitter Baba Ganoush!)

In your food processor or blender, pulse the tahini with the lemon juice, then incorporate the yogurt if you are including it. Add the mashed eggplant, garlic to taste, and a good pinch of salt, pepper, and honey. Pulse until the mixture is smooth and taste to adjust flavoring. At the end, add a couple of tablespoons of parsley and pulse a few times to chop / incorporate (do not pulse too much or add too early; it can make the herb bitter).

Spread the puree onto a flat serving dish or bowl and garnish with a drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkling of salt, pepper, a pinch of smoked paprika, and a sprig of parsley. For best flavor, serve at room temperature.

Serve with pita chips and crudites.






I am participating in the Global Cook Along project, where we try recipes from around the world. We focus on one region's cuisine each week. We try to do ours as one big potluck-style meal each week, but other people are doing one meal a night, a week, whatever works for them! To learn more, see additional recipes, or to participate yourself, check out our livejournal community and / or our facebook group!

with love from K-Pidge :)

Greek Feast, Part Five: Saganaki

Opa! What Greek feast would be complete without cheese and fire? Not ours, that's for certain!

There was a bit of a debate on my Facebook page, when I was discussing the possibility of saganaki for the evening, as to whether or not saganaki is actually a Greek dish, or whether it was started in Chicago and is just assumed to be Greek, in much the same way fortune cookies are assumed to be Chinese. Personally, I love fire and cheese, and I'm a Chicago girl, so I'm perfectly willing to accept it either way.

The eminent wikipedia seems to believe that saganaki is actually a Greek dish, named after the pan it is traditionally prepared in, but that the flambee part of the dish originated in Chicago, and is predominantly an American tradition. The perfect fusion of cultures, if you ask me. Pan-fried cheese lit on fire. Opa!

There are a variety of cheeses that can be used to make saganaki; the one that was most readily available to us was kasseri. My husband had parked in Chicago's Greektown, not too far from his office building, that day, so he offered to pick up the cheese. As it turned out, the area he parked in had no grocers nearby (or perhaps there ARE no Greek grocers in Greektown, only Greek restaurants), so he ventured into a restaurant with which he is fairly familiar and asked if he could buy some of their saganaki cheese off of them. Apparently they weren't in the mood to be generous, even for a well-known customer, because they sold him the plain saganaki cheese for the price at which they would sell the full saganaki experience! So our do-it-yourself saganaki cost us just as much as it would to go to the restaurant and have them do it for us.

While he was off on his cheese-procuring mission, S-Pidge and I were busy checking out saganaki recipes. What would we need? Turns out just a bit of egg, flour, oil, a lemon, the cheese itself... and, of course, the alcohol for the flambee part. "Do you have brandy?" she texted me. I check our bar downstairs, which is quite well stocked despite the fact that neither of us are big drinkers. Alas, no brandy. But I have cognac! (This is a mystery to me, since neither my husband nor I DRINK cognac. The bottle has never been opened. But it was there!) Somewhere in the dim recesses of my brain, I recall hearing that brandy and cognac are similar, or perhaps the same. I turn to my trusty friend, The Internet, for answers. And The Internet is plentiful in its bounty, for it teaches me that cognac is a distilled form of brandy. Thus, all cognacs are brandy (but not all brandies are cognacs). DING DING DING! Project saganaki is a go!


Keep your eye on S-Pidge; she'll drink up all the Hennessy you got on your shelf!

To make this delicious dish, you just heat up some olive oil in a pan on the stove. While the oil is heating, beat up an egg or two. Dip the cheese slice(s) in egg, then coat them with flour. Drop them in the oil and pan-fry them until golden brown on both sides.


oh delicious cheese, soon to be fried and flamed.

Some folks dispense with the flouring process and just fry up the cheese; some broil the cheese instead of pan-frying it. I don't know how those methods turn out, but I will say that not only did our flour-pan-fry method turn out DELICIOUS, it was very similar to the saganaki I've eaten at various Greek restaurants.


Just look at that gorgeous piece of saganaki, right in the middle of the plate.

We removed the saganaki from the pan and put it into a (hopefully fire-safe) serving dish, carried it into the dining room, poured a tiny bit of cognac on top, and took a match to it. FLAMBEE! Let it burn for a few seconds, then squeeze half a lemon over each piece to put the fire out. DELICIOUS. Though my five year old son was very suspicious of the entire process, and kept asking us why the cheese tasted like BEER the entire time he was eating it. Ah, the suggestibility of a young mind. (If you've never had saganaki, I assure you it doesn't taste like alcohol at all. You use such a minimal amount, and it all burns off anyway! Also you don't HAVE to flambee the cheese... but why WOULDN'T you??)


It IS on fire here, it's just hard to tell because the flash was on. What we lack in photographic abilities, we make up for in flavor! And fire!

Saganaki

INGREDIENTS
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup of flour
1 slice of kasseri cheese, about 3 inches wide, 1/2 inch thick
olive oil
1 lemon
a dash of brandy or cognac

DIRECTIONS
In a skillet over medium-high heat, heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil. While the oil is heating, dredge the cheese slice in the beaten egg, then coat liberally with flour. Put the cheese in the pan and fry until brown on one side; flip over and brown the other side. Remove cheese to a fire-safe plate. Pour a dash of brandy (or cognac) on top, light. Shout "Opa!" and squeeze half of the lemon on top to extinguish the flames. Cut into slices and serve immediately.


That's how we roll.




I am participating in the Global Cook Along project, where we try recipes from around the world. We focus on one region's cuisine each week. We try to do ours as one big potluck-style meal each week, but other people are doing one meal a night, a week, whatever works for them! To learn more, see additional recipes, or to participate yourself, check out our livejournal community and / or our facebook group!

with love from K-Pidge :)

Greek Feast, Part One: Spanakopita!

This week we are exploring the cuisine of Greece, and that means I get to try my hand at one of my favorite foods: Spanakopita! Spanakopita is a savory pastry with a phyllo dough crust and a spinach-cheese (typically feta, or feta and a mix of white salted cheeses) filling. It can be cooked as one large pie or as several small triangular pouches (boureki) and is often served as an appetizer.

Phyllo is often intimidating to your average home cook, and fear of complicated recipes often means that some delicious dishes are limited to those times when we can get out to a restaurant that serves them. Fear of working with Phyllo, along with the fact that Greek foods are not something I grew up eating at home (and therefore am utterly unfamiliar with any of the processes involved in cooking them), kept me from trying my hand at recipes like this. If you would love to have spanakopita at home but have been putting it off, take it from me: you CAN do it! It wasn't even that painful. Everything they say about phyllo being a pain in the ass to work with is true; I won't lie. But it wasn't a HARD process, and it was fairly forgiving. Give it a try, and you just might end up with something delicious. Come with me as I walk you through it; I'll even hold your hand if you want.

I started by trying to pick a recipe from my good friend The Internet. There are a lot of recipes out there, and a lot of cooking blogs (so if you're reading our little blog here, thanks!), as I'm sure you know. With some recipes I find something that sounds delicious and I go with it; with others, I pick and choose until I have something that sounds good to me. That's what I did with this one. Some of the recipes I found had things I liked that others didn't, and some had things I thought would be better left out. The basics were all the same; spinach, feta, egg, salt, pepper. It was little things, like different cheeses and spices, that I tweaked. The recipe I used is at the end. Here is the basic process I followed:

The night before, if your phyllo dough is frozen, MAKE SURE YOU THAW IT IN THE FRIDGE. You won't be able to work with frozen phyllo dough, you'll just frustrate the hell out of yourself.

I would suggest thawing your spinach the night before too. I put mine in the fridge the morning of baking, thinking spinach would thaw out pretty quickly... and it didn't. It was pretty much still frozen solid, to the point that even running it under cold water didn't work very well, and I ended up having to defrost it in the microwave and drain it and use paper towels to soak up as much of the liquid as possible. Save yourself the trouble! Make sure you give it plenty of time to thaw!

Heat a medium saute pan (or skillet, which is what I used) over medium heat and add just enough olive oil to coat the bottom. Chop your onion (I did a medium dice) and add the chopped onion. Cook it for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally (mine was decently browned when I was done). While the onion is cooking, slice up your green onions. After the five minutes have passed, add the green onions and cook for another 2 minutes. Turn off heat and allow to cool.

Mix the spinach, feta, dill, parsley, green onions, eggs, parmesan, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a large bowl. The order doesn't really matter, but I like to start with the eggs because I have this paranoia about getting a rotten one and having all my ingredients be lost if I add them first and then accidentally add a rotten egg to the mix. This has never HAPPENED to me so I'm not sure why I worry about it, but I do! At any rate, this made a goodly amount of filling; we had a very thick spanakopita. Next time I will probably cut back the amount of spinach I use a little, and use more feta. I like a cheesier filling! I also would add a little more dill and a tad bit more salt. I went very light on the salt because the cheese is salty, but it could have used more. Overall it was tasty, don't get me wrong! But I feel it could be improved nonetheless. Still very happy with it though; ate it again today, lol.


the filling mixture

Brush the bottom of an 8x8 inch baking pan with olive oil. As you can see, I used a much larger dish. (My dish was also not very accommodating to the rectangular pieces of phyllo dough, but I managed!)

Place a sheet of phyllo dough in the pan and brush the top with olive oil. You may have to cut (or rip, as is the case with my laziness) the phyllo dough to fit the pan, and it's OK to run it up the sides so you have a nice crust! I also alternated the direction for each layer. The phyllo was so surprisingly soft and pliant, but VERY thin so it did not stretch. It did, however, do a marvelous job of not sticking to itself and of going exactly where I wanted it. I had a little trouble getting the olive oil up the sides of my pan, which meant I had trouble getting the phyllo to stick to the sides. But that is more a function of the pan I used as well as the crappy pastry brush I have, and is not the phyllo dough's fault. I wouldn't have minded this layer being a little thicker - we had a LOT of filling and not much crust. It was tasty though. So the recipe calls for repeating this step until you have 6 layers. I don't think a few more would hurt.


the assembled bottom layer

Place the spinach mixture on top of the phyllo dough.


filled with all things that are good

Place a sheet of phyllo dough on the spinach and brush the top with olive oil. Repeat until you have 6 layers. As with the bottom layer, I would probably use a couple more sheets. But I like a bit more crust, and like I said, the filling was very thick (and delicious!). I tucked all the corners in around the top of the pie so they wouldn't burn, and I made sure there was a decent coat of olive oil on the top of the spanakopita before popping it into the oven. Please note that while this was not HARD (sometimes a bit of a pain but not difficult), it IS time consuming, so give yourself plenty of time to get the phyllo right and not feel rushed for time.


topped and ready to go in the oven!

I had the oven preheating at 350 while I was working on assembling the spanakopita. Ours took easily over an hour to cook, though I started checking it at short intervals after half an hour. It was easily twice as large as the recipe called for so I knew it would take longer but I didn't want it to burn. Even leaving it in for an hour, it was still only slightly golden brown on top, and another ten minutes didn't hurt at all.


baked and out of the oven! Note a few of the other dishes I'll be talking about this week surrounding it. Yum!

The end result was incredibly delicious. As I mentioned at various points above, I might tweak it a little bit in the future but if this was the only spanakopita I ever got to eat, I'd be pretty darn happy with it. Our guests all seemed to enjoy it too, and they even ate it cold for lunch the next day and proclaimed it equally delicious. My husband and I had it warmed for dinner the next day (reheated in the oven to maintain crispness) and it was still good. I even added a little tzatziki sauce (recipe coming in a future post) with the leftovers and it was pretty tasty.


the finished plated product, there on the right, surrounded by other delicious Greek foods!

I am really looking forward to trying this again, one day when it's ALL I'm making, and trying to make it in the little boureki pockets. I would love this to be surrounded by more flaky pastry crusty goodness, because who wouldn't love that? mmmm!



Our recipe is as follows (note that for the pan I used, I doubled this. I was feeding two families AND I wanted leftovers. Which I have in abundance!):

Delicious Dorson Spanakopita Pie

Ingredients:
2 pounds frozen chopped spinach (thawed and well-drained (press out additional moisture))
1.5 cup feta (crumbled)
1/4 cup FRESH dill (chopped)
1 bunch green onions (sliced)
3 eggs (lightly beaten)
1/2 c. freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tsp garlic powder
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil (I didn't measure, and I used it pretty liberally)
phyllo dough

 (roughly 15 sheets)

Directions:
1. Heat a medium saute pan over medium heat and add just enough olive oil to coat the bottom. Add the chopped onion and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the scallions and cook for another 2 minutes until the scallions are wilted but still green.

2. Mix the spinach, feta, dill, parsley, green onions, eggs, parmesan, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a large bowl.

3. Brush the bottom of an 8x8 inch baking pan with olive oil.

4. Place a sheet of phyllo dough in the pan and brush the top with olive oil. (You may have to cut the phyllo dough to fit the pan, and it's OK to run it up the sides so you have a nice crust!) Repeat until you have 6 layers.

5. Place the spinach mixture on top of the phyllo dough.

6. Place a sheet of phyllo dough on the spinach and brush the top with olive oil. Repeat until you have 6 layers.

7. Bake in a preheated 350F oven until golden brown on top, about 30-50 minutes.



I am participating in the Global Cook Along project, where we try recipes from around the world. We focus on one region's cuisine each week. We try to do ours as one big potluck-style meal each week, but other people are doing one meal a night, a week, whatever works for them! To learn more, see additional recipes, or to participate yourself, check out our livejournal community and / or our facebook group!

with love from K-Pidge :)