No -- thankfully I have not been fasting, but I have been generally away from my kitchen and, more recently, have been overly involved with my math. Its hard to think of math and cooking as really being mutually exclusive, but they have been for me. The main reason is that when I'm working hard on math I go into my office at 9 or so, and then don't leave, generally, until 9 or 10 in the evening. The result of this is that I can't go shopping in the cheap stores I like to frequent, and also when I get home I'm super hungry and want something immediately. A sad state indeed, but it should improve as the school year begins again and I recover the semblance of a schedule.
Enough gripping though. This is a food blog not a complaining blog, and I write today to report on progress in the battle between math and food. I today, due to hunger, cheapness, a desire to cook, and a bag of eggplants from Chinatown, decided to do some morning cooking. As my parents were visiting this weekend I ended up wandering with them down to Chinatown. There is a very strong magnetic force between me and the outdoor markets along the Manhattan bridge, so once I was within a few blocks I couldn't fight the attraction. Having only seven dollars in my wallet I needed to be careful. After surveying the deals I bought 3lbs of leeche nuts for $3, 2 lbs of eggplant for $1, 10 plums for $1, 2 lbs of Chinese broccoli for $1 and an ample amount of garlic for my last dollar.
My morning task was to make use of all of the non-fruit ingredients, plus some leftover carrots from a previous Chinatown trip. The first project was to make eggplant parmigiana. This was inspired by a friend who mentioned that he had made this a few days ago and it had been really good. I was dealing with Chinese eggplants which are long and skinny, so I sliced them at a pretty sharp diagonal to yield large enough pieces. These went into a drainer with a lot of salt and dessicated for about an hour. More on this in a moment.
While the eggplant was loosing water weight I decided to make use of the Chinese broccoli and prepare a dish which is a mix between something my mom loves to make with any dark leafy green, and a dish which I had prepared for me when I was visiting with a professor in California earlier in the summer. The general idea is to cook the green with some garlic, ginger, raisin, hot pepper, and soy sauce until it is nice and tender. It works best to use a little oil and cook the non-greens for a minute and then to add the tougher, stems of the greens, and a few minutes later the leaves. The cooked out liquid and soy sauce makes a nice thin liquid. Along with the cooked greens I toasted some pine nuts and then grated some parmigiana cheese. These are for sprinkling over the greens. Finally, a great way to serve this is to cook some soba noodles and in a bowl put a base of the soba, then the greens, nuts and cheese and some of the liquid. This constituted the second dish I prepared this morning.
But back to the eggplant. Once enough water was drawn out I wanted to bread and fry the pieces. My technique here was lacking, but due to the power of cast iron it ended up alright. Ideally one would pat the pieces dry and then dredge in flour and then fry in a heavy skillet with some oil. I guess I forgot to pat dry, because the flour got pretty clumpy when I was handling it. None-the-less the breaded eggplant still managed to get nice and browned. All the meanwhile I had been preparing a simple tomato sauce from crushed garlic, diced onion and pepper (hot and green) and crushed tomatoes which simmer for 20 minutes of so. Part of the sauce went in the bottom of a large rectangular glass pan, then a portion of the eggplant, a portion of slice mozzarella, some more sauce, some more eggplant, some more mozzarella, some more sauce and finally some grated parmigiana. Sounds like a lot of layering, but I imagine it doesn't actually matter. I baked this for about 25 minutes, or how ever long it took me to clean up from all of the cooking. Turned out pretty good in the end.
The third dish, which has gotten lost in the narration, was a quinoa recipe suggested in the comments of an earlier post on quinoa. I've made it before and enjoyed it, and this time it turned out just as well. I'll leave it to the interested reader to track down the old post (hint: just search for quinoa on my blog).
In any case, I'm happy to say that I'm back in my apartment with my trusty cast iron, so there should be plenty to post about. Also, at some point I will need to give my culinary opinion about food I eat during my travels this summer. Preview: I ate a lot of dried and smoked fish when in Prague since everything else is meat.
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