Spiced aubergine stew

I received Nigel Slater's Tender for my birthday in December - and it has quickly become one of my favourite cookbooks. Every time I read a bit of it, it makes me want to eat and grow vegetables! The book is set out alphabetically, with each chapter dealing with a different vegetable in the garden and in the kitchen. Admittedly, I am biased about this book because Nigel Slater is already one of my favourite food writers. I adore the way he writes about food and even the recipes in the book are interesting reading. I also particularly love the photos of his small but productive London garden over the four seasons. Oh, to have a garden that looks like that!

Aubergine is one of the first chapters in the book, and recently I followed the recipe for a spiced aubergine stew and - it was amazing! The stew was spiced with cardamon and coriander seeds, perfect because I love those flavours. There was also a sweetness from the tomatoes, followed by the creaminess of the coconut cream and then lastly a real hit of chilli heat. The aubergine was meltingly soft. We ate the stew with basmati rice and it was delicious.

It's one of those recipes where you definitely want whole spices to grind yourself. The spices smelt amazing. Near the end of the cooking time, I tasted the sauce before and after adding the herbs, and I think I preferred it without the herbs. The herbs seemed to make take the pow! out of the stew and make it less spicy. I will leave them out next time because I loved that chilli hit.

I reckon even people who don't normally like aubergine wouldn't mind this dish. And if you don't like aubergine? Well, I'll leave you with a quote from the book, and perhaps it will change your mind:

The aubergine seduces. No other vegetable can offer flesh so soft, silken and tender. You don't so much chew an aubergine as let it dissolve on your tongue.

I'm convinced.



Spiced aubergine stew

Adapted from Nigel Slater's Tender Volume 1

Note: I have paraphrased the recipe to make it more "instruction-y". The recipe in the book is far more chatty.

Enough for 6

1kg aubergines
2 medium onions
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
8 green cardamon pods
2 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons black peppercorns
4 cloves garlic
a thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled
2 rounded teaspoons ground turmeric
2 x 400g can of diced or whole tomatoes
1 x 400ml tin of coconut cream
water
4 small, hot red chillies, finely chopped
a small bunch of mint (I would suggest leaving this out)
a small bunch of coriander (again, would suggest leaving this out)

Wipe the aubergines and cut them into fat chunks (don't cut them too small). Place a colander into the sink, tip in the aubergines, and sprinkle salt over them. Let sit for 30 minutes.

Peel and roughly chop the onions. Heat the oil in a large pan over a medium heat, and add the onions, cooking until they are soft and translucent.

Meanwhile, crush the cardamon pods with the flat of a knife, and shake out the little black seeds into a mortar or spice grinder. Add the coriander seeds and peppercorns, and grind all the spices to a coarse powder.

Thinly slice the garlic and cut the ginger into thin matchsticks. Stir the garlic and ginger into the onions. Add the turmeric, ground spices and canned tomatoes.

Rinse the aubergines and pat dry. Without oil, fry them in a pan until they are starting to soften and starting to go brown, turning them as they cook. Do a small amount at a time, until all the aubergines are fried.

Add the aubergines to the onions, and add the coconut milk, chillies and a little salt. Add enough water to just cover, if necessary. Bring up to the boil, and then turn down to a low simmer and cook for about 45 minutes. Afterwards, the aubergines should be very soft but not falling apart.

Lift out the aubergines and some of the onions with a draining spoon. Boil the sauce hard for five minutes to reduce, and then puree with a stick blender (you could skip this step and just have a chunky sauce).

Return the vegetables to the pot, chop up the mint and coriander and stir in, and season with salt and pepper. Serve with rice.

Chickpea bake

I have heard many things about the famous Moroccan Soup Bar and it's amazing chickpea bake, but I haven't been there yet (I know, I know). I have eaten a chickpea bake once, when a friend made it at one of our FFOFs, and I remember it being tastier than it initially seemed. I was thinking about it the other day because I had some Lebanese flat bread in the pantry. The bread was a bit stale, so I was trying to think of a way to use it up.

In some ways it's a good thing I've never had the Moroccan Soup Bar version of the chickpea bake because I don't have any preconceived ideas about how it should taste. I can tinker with my own version to my heart's content!

So I googled for a chickpea bake recipe, and found one on a blog called the mobius strip. I adapted this recipe to my taste, mostly in the way I cooked the eggplant and flat bread. I also added some chermoula spice, that I had purchased from the Harvest Picnic.



The chickpea bake was good - I really loved the crispy flat bread and the tangy, slightly spicy chickpeas. I thought it could've used a squeeze of lemon juice and might try that next time I make it.

I topped the bake with some spinach from my garden, to add a bit of green. Speaking of my garden, I have cracked the coriander growing problem. After a bit of research, I found that coriander is quite sensitive to transplanting, which might be why I had so much problem with seedlings. I sowed some coriander from seed a few weeks ago, and they sprouted without any problems. They've very small at the moment, but seem to be growing successfully. The rest of my plants are also growing well, although my basil, mint and spinach seem to have been decimated by unidentified insects and the recent heat wave. I'm hoping they will revive! They're not completely toast, but they're not as lush as they were a week ago.



Chickpea Bake

Adapted from the mobius strip

Serves 3-4

3 pieces of flat Lebanese bread
Olive oil for spraying
2 teaspoons of chermoula spice (or any other desired mixture of spices)
1 medium eggplant, cut into cubes
1 teaspoon of olive oil
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1 onion, peeled and diced
1 teaspoon chermoula spice (or other mixture)
400g can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
Salt and pepper
1 cup yoghurt
A handful of baby spinach (optional)

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Lightly spray the bread with olive oil, and sprinkle the spice on top. Toast in the oven for about 10 minutes, or until nice and crispy. Take it out of the oven and crush/rip into smallish pieces. Turn the oven down to 180 degrees C.

Steam the eggplant over boiling water for about 10 minutes, or until tender. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat, and saute the garlic and onions until soft. Add the spice mixture, chickpeas and the steamed eggplant. Fry lightly for a couple of minutes to warm the chickpeas. Season with salt and pepper.

Put the chickpea mixture into a baking dish, then stir through the yoghurt. Place the dish into the oven until the chickpea bake is just warmed through (don't bake it for too long or at too high a heat in case the yoghurt curdles).

Take the chickpea bake out of the oven, and stir through the toasted flat bread (or layer if you prefer). Top with spinach if desired, and eat immediately before the bread softens.

Spicy eggplant and garlic shoots

Remember encyclopedias? Do you remember how those big books took up several shelves? This is a very nerdy thing to admit, but when my parents bought us a set of encyclopedias, I read most of the volumes. Nowadays, with Wikigoogle at our fingertips, who needs encyclopedias filling up the bookshelf?

Wikipedia in particular is great. Now, I know there are problems with it: anyone can edit it (gasp), plus it's on the internets and we all know that everything on the internet is a lie. But since I don't look at it when I need 100% accuracy, I reckon it's fab!

For example, if it wasn't for Wiki, I never would have known that:

"Eggplant is richer in nicotine than any other edible plant, with a concentration of 100 ng/g (or 0.01mg/100g). However, the amount of nicotine from eggplant or any other food is negligible compared to passive smoking."

Put that in your aubergine and smoke it.....!

Righto, enough of the bad puns and useless trivia, how about a recipe? I made this dish to use up the second half of the bunch of garlic shoots that I cooked previously. I think that the eggplant worked nicely with the garlic shoots - they were soft against the crunchy shoots and the eggplant also absorbed some of the flavour.

Despite the amount of chilli in the recipe, and the extremely hot vapours that will come out of the wok, the end result isn't actually that spicy. But you're not supposed to eat the chillis. Those little babies will be hot!



Spicy eggplant and garlic shoots

Serves 4 as part of a multi dish meal

4-5 small eggplants (or a couple of large ones)
1/2 bunch garlic shoots, sliced into 3cm lengths
150g bean sprouts
1 tablespoon peanut oil
A handful of dried whole chillis
Soy sauce

Slice the eggplants into 2-3cm pieces. Steam over a pot of boiling water for approximately 10 minutes, or until they are tender.

Give the garlic shoots and bean sprouts a good rinse, and drain well.

Heat the oil in a hot wok. When the oil is hot, throw in the chillis. They will darken quickly, so watch them! Add the garlic shoots and stir fry for a couple of minutes, until they are tender and start to darken in spots.

Add the bean sprouts and eggplant and swish around for another minute.

Add a splash of soy sauce and mix well to coat the vegetables. Taste – you may want to add more seasoning, but I found that the soy sauce was enough.

Serve with rice.

Eggplant, basil and feta rolls

I have had a strange relationship with eggplant throughout my life. When I was a young child, I loved eggplant. I couldn't get enough of it. Then one day I stopped liking it. I despised it, I hated the soft texture, the taste, the way it sometimes stings the tongue. And then, suddenly, when I got past my teens, I liked it again.



Maybe one day my love/hate eggplant relationship will switch again, but right now I'm in an I Love Eggplant phase. I prepared these eggplant, basil and feta rolls the other week and served them with salad. Not only was it a very satisfying dinner, but it was also a dinner chock full of vegies. I roasted the rolls with some home made tomato sauce, but you could also serve the rolls without sauce as nibbles.



To make them, thinly slice the eggplants lengthways. Brush lightly with oil, then put under a grill for 5 minutes or so until they soften and brown a little. Flip the eggplant slices over, brush with oil and put under the grill again. Let the eggplant cool slightly. Place a basil leaf and a spoon full of feta on the edge of each eggplant slice. Roll up the eggplant and secure – I tied them up with chives but you could just use toothpicks. You can eat them at this stage or you can roast them with sauce.

Note – if you are going to put some sauce on top and roast in the oven, leave out the basil when rolling up the eggplant and instead scatter on top once it's served.