A Summer Treat: Fried Eggplant Sandwich on Homemade Pita Bread

I love eggplant, so plant several varieties in my garden. I like it roasted in a middle eastern salad – see the family recipe here – stir fried, or sliced and fried. I freeze the fried slices on layers of waxed paper placed in a box, which can then be used all winter for pasta sauces and eggplant parmesan. My favorite indulgence during summer is a fried eggplant sandwich, a meal that was a favorite when I was growing up. When I eat it now, I'm thinking that I'm basically eating some fiber with a lot of olive oil, but oh how delicious!




The eggplants that are ripe this early in the season are the smaller ones: Swallow, an Oriental type, and Diamond, which is long and narrow. To fry the eggplant:

1. Slice into approximately 1/4 inch thick slices
2. Place in a bowl and sprinkle with salt; let stand for 1/2 hour. This draws out the moisture so the eggplant doesn't absorb as much oil. Before frying, blot the eggplant with paper towels.
3. On high heat, bring about 1/4 inch of extra virgin olive oil (I think good oil is essential for this recipe) to a point where it sizzles if a piece of eggplant is placed in it.
4. Fit the eggplant slices loosely in the pan. Fry until golden brown on one side, then turn and fry the other side. When done, place on a platter lined with paper towels to blot the extra oil.

My mother always saves the extra oil from frying eggplant in a glass jar and re-uses it several times, so I do too.




Because eating fried eggplant on what we called Syrian bread was traditional in my Syrian-Jewish family, that's how I prefer to eat it now. But I can't get good bread here in rural Vermont, so I make my own. My recipe is a combination of one from Claudia Roden's Mediterranean Cookery , whose ingredient list I use, and Bread Alone by Daniel Leader, whose cooking method I use. It's quite simple, but you must have a baking stone or quarry tiles for lining the oven rack.

Pita Bread
2 cups white flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 teas salt
2 Tbs vegetable oil
1 1/2 teas dried yeast
pinch of sugar
about 1 3/4 cups water

1. Put the flour in a mixing bowl with salt and a tablespoon of oil.
2. Mix the yeast with some of the water and a pinch of sugar in a small bowl; allow it to rest until it froths, then add to the flour. Add enough additional water to make a firm soft dough. (I use the food processor to mix the dough, putting in the flour and salt and adding the water and yeast through the feed tube while the blade is spinning.)
3. Knead for about 15 minutes until elastic and smooth. If using the food processor, knead for a few minutes by hand.
4. Place the dough in a slightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and leave in a warm spot to rise until doubled, two to three hours.
5. When ready, knead briefly on a floured board and cut into 10 equal pieces. (I use my kitchen scale for this step.) Shape each piece into a tight ball and allow to rise, covered with plastic wrap, for 1/2 hour.
6. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400º for at least 1/2 hour, with a baking stone or quarry tiles (I use 6 tiles) placed in the center of the oven.
7. Roll out each ball of dough into a flat round about 5 inches in diameter. Put 3 or 4 at a time onto the stone in the preheated oven. Bake for 4 minutes, during which time the bread will puff up and make a pocket.

My breads don't come out perfectly; many times the top layer is too thin. But the combination of whole wheat and white flour is delicious and the bread is fresh, which is more than can be said for supermarket pita. It also freezes very well. It's worth giving it a try if you enjoy making bread.

From the Freezer, With a Recipe for Eggplant Sauce with Tomato

Last month, when I headed down to the root cellar to get some cabbage for dinner, it inspired me to write a blog post about my storage room in the cellar, which you can see here. The vegetables that keep in a cool cellar – potatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage – are only a portion of my winter eating. Onions, garlic, and winter squash are stored in an unheated spare bedroom. The largest variety of fruits and vegetables from my garden are stored in my small chest freezer, kept in the mudroom. There are the bags of greens – kale, spinach, and swiss chard – the peas, beans, broccoli, peppers, tomatoes, corn, zucchini, tomato sauce, pesto. And fruit: raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb. A frozen cornucopia, which takes a lot of work, to be sure: the picking and blanching and tray freezing and packing into bags (never mind the tending the garden). But to me it's worth it, so that I can have my own organically grown food all year long.




I also have fried eggplant in the freezer, ready for use in sauce and eggplant parmesan. I learned from my mother how to preserve eggplants this way. I fry the slices, drain them on paper towels, then pack them in a plastic box layered on sheets of waxed paper. Since eggplant is one of my favorite foods, it's a treat to have it on hand to make this delicious pasta sauce, from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. The broccoli is from my garden, as are the tomato and eggplant, even the red chili pepper (I grow Early Jalapeno). I cook the broccoli by braising it with garlic in a frying pan.



I love gobs of sauce on my pasta, so use more than Hazan recommends. The recipe is very flexible as to amounts of tomato and eggplant, so feel free to emphasize what you like most.

About 1 pound eggplant
salt
vegetable oil for frying the eggplant (I use olive oil; I love the flavor of it)
3 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 teas. chopped garlic
2 Tbs chopped parsley (in winter I leave this out)
1 3/4 cups canned tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
chopped hot red chili pepper, to taste
1 pound pasta (thin spaghetti is recommended)

1. Slice the eggplant, salt it and let it stand for 1/2 hour. Then drain, pat dry with paper towels, and fry in 1/2 inch hot oil until browned on both sides.
2. Put the olive oil and garlic in a saucepan and turn on heat to medium. Cook and stir garlic until it gets lightly colored.
3. Add tomatoes, parsley, chili pepper, and a little salt and stir. Lower heat to a gentle simmer and cook for about 20 minutes, until the oil separates.
4. Cut the eggplant into 3/4 inch strips and add to the sauce. Cook for another 2 or 3 minutes, stirring once or twice.
5. Taste for salt and pepper. Enjoy!

For Eggplant Lovers: Fried Eggplant Patties

It's been a very long time since I posted a recipe on this blog. But during the summer I fell in love with a recipe from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, so I wanted to share it. I had a huge crop of eggplants this past summer, and Hazan's "Eggplant Patties with Parsley, Garlic, and Parmesan" was an delicious way to use them. 

 

I did change one aspect of the recipe: in her instructions, Hazan tells us to bake whole eggplants in a 400º oven until tender, about 40 minutes. When I first tried this recipe a year or two ago, that's how I cooked the eggplants and the result, to me, was ho-hum. Instead, I decided to cook the eggplants over an open flame on the stove until they were soft and blackened, as I've cooked them for eggplant salad, recipe here. The result is a deep, smoky flavor that adds tremendous richness to the patties. 

• About 2 pounds eggplant
• 1/2 cup unflavored bread crumbs (I use Panko)
• 3 Tbs parsley, chopped fine
• 2 garlic cloves, chopped very fine (I like lots of garlic; my home-grown cloves are huge)
• 1 egg
• 3 Tbs freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese
• salt
• freshly ground black papper
• Vegetable oil
• Flour, spread on a plate

1. Cook the eggplants over a direct flame on the stove, turning them until they are charred all over and easily pierced with a two-tined fork.

2. When cool enough to handle, slip off skins, cut eggplant in large pieces––I also remove any large, hard masses of seeds––and place in a colander to drain, at least 15 minutes. You can gently squeeze the eggplant to help it release moisture. 

3.  Finely chop the eggplant and combine in a bowl with bread crumbs, parsley, garlic, egg, parmesan, salt, and pepper. Mix thoroughly. 

4. Shape into small patties around 2 inches wide and 1/2 inch thick. Smaller patties give a crispier result. 

5. Put enough vegetable oil in a skillet to come 1/4 inch up the sides (Hazan recommends 1/2 inch, but I use less), and turn the heat to high. When the oil is very hot, turn the patties in the flour on both sides and put into the pan; don't crowd them. When they're nicely browned on one side, turn them. When done, drain on a paper towel-lined pan or plate.  Serve hot or lukewarm.

Enjoy! this makes a lot of patties; the recipe says it serves 4 to 6. I heat my leftovers by putting them in a hot skillet, which maintains the crispmess. 

And if you're interested, another of my favorite ways to prepare eggplant is frying the slices,  I eat them in a pita bread sandwich, recipe here, or use for a pasta sauce with tomatoes, recipe here. 

Eggplant

Eggplant is not an easy crop to grow in northern Vermont and I love eggplant, so I have to choose varieties that will ripen here; I also grow the plants on IRT mulch, which is a black plastic that allows infrared light through to warm the soil. Growing this heat loving plant under a row cover also helps. This plant is Diamond, which ripens clusters of long narrow fruits. I've had really good luck with this variety, which I get from Fedco, a wonderful seed company in Maine; they have many varieties for northern climes.

Last night I fried up slices of eggplant in good olive oil and ate them in homemade pita bread. Delicious. I realize it's mostly like eating olive oil sandwiches, but still it's wonderful. I also like to make eggplant salad, a middle eastern recipe: cook the eggplant directly over the flame on the top of the stove till blackened all over and very soft. Then scrape out the cooked flesh, or which will have a smoky flavor; some bits of skin are fine. Chop, season with olive oil and lemon juice, and add some chopped parsley, and if you have on hand, some sweet pepper, tomato, cucumber.

Eggplant Salad

My bounteous midsummer garden basket filled early this year because of the weeks of warmer than normal weather. I grow eggplants and peppers on black plastic to warm the soil, and under row covers to keep the plants warm. Above you see the ingredients for a middle eastern eggplant salad, another recipe from my mother, and now a summer favorite for me. The smaller eggplants are from a variety called Diamond and the larger one is a Galine, both suitable for northern climates.




The special smoky flavor of the salad comes from cooking the eggplant over an open flame, which I am doing here directly on the burner of my stove. If you have an outdoor grill going, I imagine that would work really well. Cook the eggplant, whole, turning it so that it cooks all over, until it is blackened and very soft. I poke a two-tined fork into it in places to be sure that it is done.




Split open the cooked eggplants and scrape out the masses of seeds and discard them. Then scoop out the flesh, chop it and place it in a bowl. Small pieces of skin may stick to some of the flesh, but that just adds flavor, so don't try to remove every last bit.

This salad is good with some finely chopped green pepper, some chopped tomatoes, finely chopped onion (I forgot to put an onion in the basket photo), and chopped parsley. These ingredients are very fluid; more or less of any of them won't ruin the salad. Or you can add cucumbers. To give some idea of amounts, I had about 1 1/2 lbs of eggplant. With that I used: 1/2 green pepper, 1/2 medium onion, 8 cherry tomatoes, about 1/2 cup parsley.

Dress with olive oil and lemon juice, and season to taste with salt. Amounts? I used about 3 Tbs olive oil and the juice of 1/2 lemon. It should have a bit of a lemony flavor. I made this for friends a few days ago and it was a big hit. We ate it as an appetizer on my homemade sourdough bread; delicious!

The Vegetable Garden: Aesthetic and Gustatory Pleasures

I love my vegetable garden. What could be more wonderful than bringing a basket of just-picked vegetables into the house for a meal? It's not just the taste that is important––you'll never buy a potato as good as one that's homegrown––but there is also the act of planting a seed, then watching the seedlings emerge, grow, and bear fruit. Even after almost 30 years of raising vegetables in this place, it still seems a magical process. It's a process of hit and miss––some years a great eggplant crop, another year hardly a one; sometimes insects go on the rampage––but there are always enough successes; it's a process of hope. As Margaret Atwood wrote:

Gardening is not a rational act. 

And May Sarton, in At Seventy: A Journal:

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Although I've mostly given up on my flower borders, concentrating my energy on growing vegetables, I do plant some flowers amongst the the food crops. It's a delight to look out at my garden and see towering sunflowers, adding good cheer to the scene. These are Lemon Queen, and this plant grew to 8 feet tall this summer. But it's not just the sunflowers that I find beautiful; each vegetable plant has its own aesthetic qualities. Corn tassels pointing into the air are like delicate waving fingers.

  

A sweet pepper plant shows off its dazzling fruit, lovely to see, and to taste. 

Lettuces, with leaves of various shapes radiating from a center, are as beautiful as floral bouquets. 

Red cabbage, a grand leafy vegetable, has gorgeous leaves surrounding a stunning volleyball-sized center. 

                                 

I feel so much satisfaction in looking at my harvested crops. They are a reward of hard work, and I'm happy just contemplating them before eating. These three melons are grown from seed from Fedco Seeds, and are: on the left Alvaro, a Charentais melon; behind is a honeydew, White Honey; and on the right is a delicious hybrid, Sensation. Each of these has a different flavor, and they taste nothing like supermarket melons; oh, they are so much more delicious! 

                                 


The eggplants were very happy this year, probably because of the early heat spell that we had. I love eggplant, and it's a treat to have fresh ones to cook. Two food favorites: fried eggplant sandwiches, and eggplant salad, both family recipes. Click on the links for the recipes. The fried eggplant link has a bonus of a recipe for homemade pita bread. 

                                 

Sungold cherry tomatoes glow on the vine. They are so delicious that I stand and eat them in the garden, popping one after another into my mouth, so they rarely make it into the house. But I can recommend a way of cooking them: toss with olive oil and sauté in a pan until soft and caramelized; simple and quite tasty. 

Another vegetable that barely makes it out of the garden to a plate is corn. The kernels are so tender and sweet that cooking isn't necessary. What a pleasure to stand out in the sun, admiring the plants around me, while eating an ear of corn.

Winter squashes are like hidden gems, nestled under rampant foliage.

Preserving crops is an important part of gardening. Many of my crops will feed me through the winter into next spring. I make jam: rhubarb in the spring, blueberry and raspberry in early summer, and here: green tomato jam––recipe at the link––which is similar to a marmalade. 

I'm grateful for summers with abundant tomatoes, so I'm able to can, and to freeze sauce. I know I sound like a broken record, but home-canned tomatoes are so much more tasty than even the best canned tomatoes you can buy. I favor Juliet paste tomatoes for these purposes. For fresh eating I grow a variety of heirloom tomatoes.

 

I hang some crops to dry in the mudroom, here oat straw––which I'll cut into small pieces and use for tea––and garlic. "Awe", a perfect sentiment in regards to vegetables, is the top of a Bread and Puppet poster. 

 

Also in the mudroom are onions, with a Karl Blossfeldt photograph at the lower right, an image of gourd squash stems.

Finally, a peak inside my chest freezer, which is getting packed to the top with summer produce. You can see broccoli, green beans. zucchini, corn, whole green peppers for stuffing at the upper right, and some homemade bagels (these aren't from the garden; I don't plan to grow wheat). In addition to these ways of saving vegetables, I also have a root cellar where I keep carrots, beets, potatoes, and cabbage once the weather has cooled. 

I think about the winter ahead with satisfaction, when I can ruminate on what I'll eat for lunch or dinner and know that an abundant variety of vegetables is at hand. The pleasure goes beyond good food, into a feeling of life well lived. 

A Summer Pizza with Cherry Tomatoes, Zucchini and Eggplant

I look forward every summer to the time my garden is producing the vegetables for this delicious pizza. With its fresh taste of herbs setting off the fried zucchini and eggplant, with the sweetness of my favorite Sungold tomatoes, it's a taste of summertime. The recipe is from Deborah Madison's The Greens Cookbook, one of the staples of my cookbook shelf.

1 medium zucchini
1 Japanese eggplant
olive oil
salt and pepper
12 cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped (I use 2 cloves...love garlic!)
2 oz mozzarella cheese, grated or thinly sliced
2 oz Fontina cheese, grated (I use only mozzarella and only 2 to 3 ounces; I don't like a cheesy pizza and want the vegetables to be the stars)
3 Tbs basil, finely chopped
Parmesan
fresh thyme and basil, finely chopped

1. Prepare dough (see recipe below)
2. Slice the zucchini and eggplant diagonally into pieces 3 to 4 inches long and 1/4 inch thick. Place in a bowl and sprinkle with salt and let stand for 1/2 hour to draw out moisture. Blot on paper towels
3. Heat 1/4 inch oil in skillet on high flame. Add vegetables, not crowding them, and fry on each side until golden brown. Drain on paper towels.
4. Dress tomatoes with a tablespoon of olive oil, the garlic, and salt and pepper. Drain them before putting them on pizza.
5. Preheat oven to 500º, using a stone for a good crust.
6. Shape dough and put on well floured (or corn mealed, which is what I use) peel. Brush with olive oil and distribute most of cheese and then basil over it. Arrange zucchini and eggplant in overlapping layers with tomatoes in and around them. Dot with remaining cheese.
7. Slide pizza onto preheated stone and bake for 8 to 12 minutes. I find 10 minutes is about right in my oven.
8. Remove from oven and garnish with freshly grated Parmesan and herbs.

My pizza dough recipe comes from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. These amounts make enough for a 10-11 inch pie, perfect for the recipe above.

1 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1/4 teas salt
scant teaspoon active dry yeast dissolved in a little more than 1/2 cup water
1 Tbs plus 1 teas olive oil

1. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl, making a hollow in the center. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil and yeast mixture and work together until mixed.
2. Transfer to a board and knead until smooth, around 10 minutes.
3. Or....as I do, use a food processor, placing the flour and salt in the bowl, adding the dissolved yeast and water plus olive oil as the slowly as the blades spin. Process until dough forms a ball on top of the blades. Remove dough and knead by hand for a few minutes.
4. Put 1 teaspoon of olive oil in a large bowl and place the dough in it, turning it around so it is coated with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and let it rise in a very warm place for about 3 hours until it is doubled in bulk.
5. Form the dough into a ball and let it rest for a few minutes, then roll and stretch it out into a 10-11 inch circle.

Flowers in the Vegetable Garden

Peas, Early Frosty

We are all so excited by the spring flowers in the border that the small workhorses of our food supply are overlooked. Flowers didn't come about for our aesthetic delight, but to make seed for the next generation. In the vegetable garden, much of what we call vegetables are actually fruits, "a structure of a plant that contains its seeds", according to Wikipedia. The pea pod above has emerged from the flower and is beginning to form tiny peas. If you click on the image to enlarge, you'll be able to see a new pod curled up inside the flower.

Tomato, Roma

Eggplant, Diamond

Potato, Carola

The three plants above are members of the nightshade family; it wasn't till I took photographs of their flowers that I saw the strong family resemblance. They all have yellow male stamens that stand up inside the petals like fluted columns. The flowers don't need bees for pollination, just some movement, like the gardener walking by, or the wind. Of course potatoes are different from tomatoes and eggplant in that the vegetable grows underground, propagated by pieces of potato and not by the seeds that sometimes develop from the flowers, stored in little green balls.

Melon, Arava Cantaloupe

Winter Squash, Sunshine

The squashes do need pollinating insects to carry pollen from the male flowers, such as the glorious one above, to the female flowers. Some squashes have very showy flowers and they're often used in cooking. Melons have more discreet blooms; the one above is a female flower, which has a tiny fruit attached. If the flower is pollinated, the fruit will develop, if not, it will wither away. I've tried to pollinate the early fruit by hand with a soft brush, but I don't seem to have the knack, so now I just leave it to the bees and other insects. Happily, there are many more bees about the garden now than there were a few years ago when disease was a problem. So much inter-connection: we provide the pollen via our plantings and the bees thank us by pollinating our fruits and vegetables.

An Ode to Tomatoes

A very early Pruden's Purple, the only one showing red.

Is there anything more thrilling for a northern gardener such as myself than seeing tomatoes beginning to ripen? It's not that I don't love you Corn, or Beans, or certainly Eggplant (I adore eggplant), but the fresh, juicy Tomato is the embodiment of summer; sweet and tart, creamy smooth, each variety with its own pleasures. Mmmm: thick slices of tomato with just a little bit of coarse salt, tomato sandwiches on homemade challah, fresh uncooked tomato sauce; or, just standing in the garden, biting in, juice dripping down my chin; or, popping those small rounds of deliciousness, the apricot-colored Sungolds, into my mouth, one after another.

Here is an excerpt of Pablo Neruda's poem "Ode To Tomatoes" (you can read the entire poem here):

...
the tomato,
star of earth,
recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness. 

Sungold

                         

Zucchini!

I went out to the garden this morning to pick a couple of zucchini; smallish-medium had turned into medium-largish overnight. And a few other fruits had ballooned as well. What a plant! From a hill of just 3 zucchini plants, I get a seemingly endless procession of these elongated beauties.

Luckily, I love zucchini, cooked every which way. Tonight I'm going to make a pizza with fried zucchini and eggplant, and some cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. My favorite way of making fresh zucchini is from Marcella Hazan, sauteed zucchini with oregano. Start with lots of chopped garlic in a good amount of olive oil in a wide skillet; when the garlic starts to color, add thinly sliced zucchini and cook at lively heat till zucchini is soft and starts to brown. There's also a nice middle eastern recipe which I grew up with, a zucchini pie/omelet. You cook sliced onion and zucchini in butter till very soft, then add eggs and grated hard cheese; I use cheddar, my mother uses muenster. It's baked in a pan, in a medium oven, till brown on top, and served with yogurt.

And of course there's cream of zucchini soup, and zucchini bread (which I'll make when the weather cools a bit and post the recipe) and freezing, and, inevitably giving some away to gardenless friends.

A New Painting: "Two Textures"

 Two Textures, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 5 1/2 x 7 in. 

I had a lot of fun working on this painting, and it put me in a silly mood. I'm a little loathe to mention this, but the soundtrack in my head was "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago", one of those comic songs from the 1960s. Now that I've ruined this painting for you...in all seriousness, it was interesting for me to work with these opposing surface textures, one so smooth and shiny, the other rough. I have used texture in recent work, but to a very limited extent as I mainly focus on abstract shapes and light. I like the way the big shiny shape pushes into the space, while "speaking" with the other side through its openings, repeated by an opening of light in shadow at left. Is it possible to put the narrative genie back in the bottle once I've released it?

Two Textures, detail.

Maza: a Middle Eastern Meal of Little Dishes, with a Recipe for Bazargan

Last weekend I had to make a quick trip into the city, which luckily coincided with a Purim lunch my mother prepared for the family. She decided to make a Maza, a meal consisting of many small dishes––salads and finger food––often served after synagogue on Saturday. These are some of my very favorite Syrian Jewish foods, some of which are quite time consuming and difficult to cook so I've never learned to make them. On the plate above you see three heavenly meat dishes. There is the round pizza-like Lahma b'Ajeen, in which the meat is flavored with sour tamarind concentrate. I have tried my hand at these and they came out quite well. The torpedoes, Kibbeh, are a shell made of ground bulgur with a spicy meat filling and deep fried; it takes a good deal of skill to make them. And finally, little meat turnovers, called Sambousek.





There are always several vegetable dishes at a Maza, and here are artichoke hearts with a lemon juice and olive oil dressing.





The smoky flavor of eggplant salad is one of my favorites, which I make during the summer when the eggplants are ripe. I posted a detailed recipe for it here.





Another Middle Eastern delight are these crisp savory biscuits, Ka'ak. They are flavored with anise, coriander and nigella seed, which gives them a particular spicy flavor. I've tried making these too, and the main difficulty was getting the correct amount of crisp dryness without the rings becoming hard. They are very delicious, and much too addictive.





This last dish is delicious, a salad made with bulgur wheat flavored with sour tamarind paste or pomegranate concentrate. It's always a hit when I take it to a pot luck. The bulgur wheat is soaked to soften it, then mixed with a dressing. It is quite simple to make. Its name, Bazargan, means "of the bazaar". The recipe comes from Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food, with amendments from my mother. I like to make this a few hours before serving so the flavors soak well into the bulgur wheat.

2 cups fine bulgur wheat
salt
6-8 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
3 Tbs sour pomegranate concentrate (molasses) or 2 Tbs tamarind paste dissolved in 4 Tbs boiling water
Juice of 1 lemon or to taste
1 small grated onion
5 Tbs tomato paste
1 teas ground cumin
1 teas coriander
1/2 teas ground allspice
1/4 teas cayenne
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts, optional (my mother doesn't use them)
bunch of parsley, finely chopped, optional (my mother doesn't use it. What she did put in, as you can see from the photo above, is some finely chopped red pepper)

1. Put the bulgur wheat in a large bowl and cover with plenty of cold, slightly salted water. Leave to soak for 1/2 to 3/4 hour, or much longer if coarsely ground, until tender. Drain and press out excess water.
2. Beat the olive oil with tamarind or pomegranate paste, add lemon juice, onion, tomato paste and spices and beat well.
3. Place softened bulgur in a serving bowl, pour the dressing over and mix well. Taste for salt.
4. Add the nuts and parsley when ready to serve.

Roasted Red Pepper Pasta

This summer's hot weather has produced bumper crops of warm weather vegetables, such as tomatoes, eggplant, melons, and red-ripening peppers. I dish I love to make with red peppers is Marcella Hazan's "Roasted Red and Yellow Pepper Sauce with Garlic and Basil", from her marvelous cookbook Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Hazan can be relied on for simple, delicious recipes, and this is certainly one of them. I have found that it even works with peppers out of the freezer, so I can have it during winter, along with chopped basil frozen with olive oil.

3 meaty bell peppers, some red, some yellow (as you can see, I used only red, but yellow would be pretty; I use more peppers than the recipe calls for, since I want my sauce very full of peppery goodness; also, my peppers are smaller than the average supermarket pepper.)
16 to 20 fresh basil leaves
2 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
4 garlic cloves, peeled
salt
2 Tbs butter
2/3 cup freshly grated parmesan reggiano cheese
1 pound pasta, Hazan recommends rigatoni or other tubular pasta.

1. Wash the peppers in cold water, then slice lengthwise along crevices. Discard seeds and pulp. Using a swivel blade peeler, peel with a light motion. (I'm not very fussy about peeling.) Cut into 1/2 inch lengthwise strips, then slice them in two.
2. Rinse and dry the basil; tear larger leaves in smaller pieces.
3. Use a wide sauté pan that will hold peppers without crowding. Put olive oil in the pan with the garlic cloves and brown the garlic over medium high heat, then remove it.
4. Add peppers to the pan and cook at a lively heat for around 15 minutes, stirring often. The peppers should be tender but not mushy. (I like them to get seared, with lots of yummy burnt spots, which taste caramelized.) Add salt and remove from heat.
5. Cook the pasta; when almost done, melt butter in a small saucepan over low heat. (or if you're lazy like me, cut the butter in very small pieces and place them in pasta bowl; the hot pasta will melt them.)
6. Toss the cooked pasta with the peppers, butter, parmesan and basil. Enjoy! 

**I'll be going to Brooklyn to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with my family. I wish all my Jewish friends a very Happy New Year! See you in a few days.

Tilling the Garden

I tilled the garden a few days ago, not the entire plot, only the areas in which the warm weather crops grew: corn and squash, tomatoes, eggplant, melons. The potato and pea ground also got a once-over with the tiller. When plant debris such as corn stalks are broken up and tilled under the soil, they'll add to its nutrients and its tilth as they rot. Years ago, I found that tilling in the fall works better for my soil than spring tilling; I have sandy loam which becomes too light and fluffy with spring tilling, not holding water well. As years of gardening pass, we learn more about the particular characteristics of the plots we are cultivating, and are able to husband them more effectively.

Disease in the Vegetable Garden

Last week I was telling some friends about the horrible visitation of diseases in my vegetable garden; they suggested I write a blog post on it to show another side of gardening. I focus here on the pleasures of the garden, visual and culinary; I don't want to write about every disappointment and failure. But failures are many: seeds that don't germinate, plants that don't thrive, damage by insects and woodchucks. This summer's warmth resulted in the largest and most vigorous winter squash and zucchini plants I'd ever grown. But it may be that the warmth, with a lot of rain, encouraged the active growth of mildew. You can see its powdery appearance on the pumpkin vine above, and zucchini leaf below. I took the photos a week ago, and now the pumpkin plant is completely dead, as are the other winter squashes, with ripening fruits without the sustenance coming from the plant. They are almost ripe, so may be edible, but won't be as sweet as they should be.




The zucchini plant, being incredibly tough, is still growing leaves and zucchini, and likely will until frost.




The nightshade family––tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, though not peppers––are susceptible to blight, which spots and yellows the leaves of the plant from the bottom up, eventually killing them all. All my potato plants died back early, so will likely have smaller potatoes; the tomatoes are badly damaged, especially the determinate paste tomatoes. This leads to a smaller harvest.

Next year I will be prepared: in addition to clearing off this years crop residue, I will plant tomatoes with a new system of trellising for greater air circulation. And I plan to use some organically approved sprays against diseases, something I've avoided so far. All the difficulties in the garden make me very glad I'm not doing this for a living, and make me more appreciative of the hard work and challenges facing those who do.