Garlic Roasted Eggplant and Tomato Pasta

It’s summer time and the tomatoes are easy!  Actually, the eggplants are here in abundance as well.  As you all know roasting vegetables concentrates their flavors and adds a hint of smokiness that enhances everything under the sun.  Here’s a simple dish that is tons tastier than the effort required to make it.  Because it is made from the ripest tomatoes and the sweetest baby eggplant brushed with garlic-infused olive oil and roasted until sticky and intense.  Just toss them with pasta to spread the love.

Ingredients

11 small eggplants

Sea salt
2-3 cloves garlic

1/4 cup or 60ml olive oil plus more for greasing the baking sheet

3 medium red ripe tomatoes

10 1/2 oz or 300g your pasta of choice (I used whole wheat penne.)

Parmesan for serving (optional)

Method

Preheat our oven to 400°F or 200°C and grease your baking sheet with olive oil. 

Cut the eggplants in half lengthwise and layer them in a colander.  Sprinkle each layer with salt and leave to drain.

Mince the garlic and pop it in a small pot with the 1/4 cup or 60ml olive oil.  Heat the oil gently and remove it from the stove as soon as the garlic starts to sizzle a little bit.  You do not want it to turn brown at all.

Slice the tomatoes into thick slices and cut the little core pieces out.  Lay the slices out your greased baking sheet.

Rinse the salt and the brown stuff off of the eggplants and line them up on the baking sheet with the tomatoes.

Brush the eggplants and tomato slices with the garlic infused olive oil.  Sprinkle everything with sea salt.

Pop the baking pan in the oven and roast for 20-30 minutes or until the edges of the vegetables are turning brown.  Turn them over and brush them again with more of the garlic olive oil.  

Return the baking pan to the oven for another 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook your pasta according to package instructions in some lightly salted water.  When the pasta is boiled, reserve a cup of the pasta water and drain the rest. 

Return the pasta to the hot pot and pour the remaining garlic olive oil into the pasta and stir.

When the vegetables are done, scrape the baking pan to remove the eggplants and tomato slices and any sticky stuff you can get off of the pan as well.

Add them to the pasta pot and stir thoroughly.  

If the pasta seems dry, add a little of the reserved pasta water. Serve with some grated Parmesan, if desired.

This dish is so rich and flavorful!

Enjoy!

Green Beans with Fresh Tomatoes and Thyme

Green beans with fresh tomatoes and thyme are a great side dish chicken, steak, pork chops or fish. In fact they go well with everything. Or eat them on their own!

This week I am away from my kitchen, spending time in Venice and Ravenna, Italy and having a great time seeing the sights and admiring the art and architecture.  So here's something I cooked and wrote a while back but never posted.

Elder daughter has never been a fan of cooked tomatoes, so when she still lived at home, I didn’t make things in tomato sauce very often or add tomatoes to many cooked dishes.  She was not a picky child, this being her one dislike – she was the only other person in the family who joined me in the love of beets! – so it seemed a small concession to a mostly flexible eater.  I’m also not saying she wouldn’t eat the cooked tomatoes, after all, just that they were not her preference.

Her sister will not eat beets, but spaghetti Bolognaise and lasagna were two of her favorite meals.  Both traditionally have tomato-based sauces, of course.  So I walked a fine line of pleasing everyone by cooking those only occasionally but always when her sister was traveling or spending the night with a friend.  It’s all about planning.  Do other families do this balancing act?

Suddenly, with both girls away at university (and, boy, do I miss them daily) I am free, free to cook whatever I want.  (Also free to travel when dear husband has a business trip somewhere interesting!) Thankfully, their father eats everything.  (But beets.)  I love this dish because the colors are gorgeous.  And it tastes good too.

Green Beans with Fresh Tomatoes and Thyme

These are best made with red ripe tomatoes. If you don't have any, good quality canned tomatoes can be substituted. 

Ingredients

1/2 lb or 225g green beans

2 red ripe tomatoes

Generous sprinkle of fresh thyme leaves

5 cloves garlic

Olive oil

Sea salt

Black pepper

Method

Chop off the tops and tails of the green beans.

Cut the tomatoes into small pieces.

Pop your tomatoes into a dry non-stick skillet on high heat and brown (scorch) them a little.

Sprinkle on the thyme leaves, salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, slice your garlic very thinly.

Give the tomatoes a good drizzle of olive oil and add in the garlic.   Let it fry a little bit then add in the green beans.

Toss them in the tomatoes and olive oil and then add about half a wine glass of water and put the lid on.

Let the beans steam for a few minutes, depending on how soft you like them.  Crunchy beans will take just a few minutes.  Very tender beans might take as long as seven to 10 minutes.  Check them occasionally by tasting a bean and remove the pan from the heat when you are happy with the bite of the beans.  (Add more water if it gets dry before the beans are cooked to your satisfaction.)  While you are checking the tenderness, add more salt and pepper if necessary.

Serve along side some roasted chicken and rice with gravy.  

Beso admiring the roasted chicken in the oven.  We have never had an oven just his height before.
He finds it endlessly fascinating to watch meat cook.

Or whatever else you have on the menu.  These green beans with garlic and tomatoes go with just about anything.

Enjoy!

Maque Choux – Spicy Cajun Corn

 In the hotel suite in Cairo, I have a two-burner stove.  With confidence, I went out and bought two cooking vessels:  a frying pan and a small pot.  What you can’t cook in those two, really doesn’t need cooking, right?  Funny thing is, they can’t sit on the stove together.   Yeah, I know I have a strange sense of humor but when I got back from Carrefour and realized that I had overestimated my space allotment, it made me laugh.  Oh, well, it gets more and more like camping.  And I enjoy a challenge. 

Dinner was simple, spaghetti Bolognaise, so I am not going to bore you with that recipe.  Instead, here are instructions for another Louisiana specialty that Thanksgiving or Christmas at our house would not be Thanksgiving or Christmas without.  While the ham was baking the other day, this was one of the two other dishes I made to bring along to the Christmas party.

My grandmothers made maque choux from fresh sweet corn on the cob, first cutting the niblets off and then scraping the cob to get the “milk” out.  Many places I have lived over the years didn’t have sweet corn, just what we would call cows’ corn – hard and indigestible for humans, used only as feed for cattle – so I learned that frozen corn is an excellent substitute.  And when your fresh cobs are not so juicy, the frozen is actually closer what my grandmothers would have used.

Ingredients

About 3 lbs or 1.350kg frozen sweet corn 

1 medium or two small green bell peppers or capsicums

2 medium onions

3 medium red ripe tomatoes

7 oz or 200g butter

Olive oil

1/2 cup or 120ml whole milk

Sea salt

Cayenne

Method

Halve the tomatoes and discard the seeds.  Chop the tomatoes, onions and bell peppers.

Sautee the vegetables in the butter with just a glug of olive oil added.   

When the onions are translucent, add in the corn.  

Add the milk and then the sea salt and cayenne to taste.  

Cook over a slow fire until the corn is soft and the other vegetables are almost a memory.  My mom likes the corn still crunchy so, if you agree with her, about 10-15 minutes will probably do.  I cooked this about 30-45 minutes because I wanted it soft and I wanted it to dry out just a bit.  

 This is meant to be a spicy dish so don't be shy with the cayenne! 

Enjoy!

Poached Salmon and Tomato Sauce with Pasta

I have an unusual piece of salmon.  Perhaps unusual is not a fair description because every salmon has a tail.  It’s just not the customary piece people buy and cook.  I ended up with this lovely shiny tail when I bought a whole frozen salmon from the frozen butcher.  By which I mean he sells mostly frozen products, not that he is made of ice. 

The nice guys in the white rubber aprons cut my whole fish apart into steaks with an exposed electric saw that made me shudder for their fingers.  And then they popped all the pieces in a plastic bag, which I put in my freezer.  Gradually we have eaten all the proper pieces, that is to say, the steaks and now I am left with just the tail.  It seems to have a lot of meat so I decided to poach it, debone it and use the meat and poaching liquid to make a sauce for pasta. 

Here goes.

Ingredients

1 piece of salmon tail – a little more than 1 pound or half a kilo of fish.  Substitutions encouraged.

8 garlic cloves

1 can (425g or 15oz) whole or crushed tomatoes

1/2 cup dry white wine

6 springs of fresh thyme (4 for poaching liquid, 2 to serve)

1/2 teaspoon sugar

Sea salt

Black pepper

Olive oil

250g or 8 oz pasta

Method

Chop the garlic up and the sauté it with a little olive oil in a relatively deep saucepan.

Add in the can of tomatoes and, if they are whole, break them up with the spoon.

Add in the white wine and the 1/2 teaspoon of sugar and bring to a boil.

Meanwhile, season your fish tail with sea salt and several grinds of fresh black pepper.

Let the poaching liquid boil for just a few minutes then turn it down to simmer.

Add the salmon tail and enough water to bring the level up to at least cover half of it.

Add in four of the sprigs of thyme and cover the pan.  Set your timer for 25 minutes. 

Halfway through, turn the salmon over.  

When the timer dings, remove the salmon from the poaching liquid and leave it to cool.

Turn the heat under the poaching liquid back up and let it boil along merrily until reduced by half.

Meanwhile, put your pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta.  Cook your pasta of choice according to package instructions.  Drain and keep warm. 

When the fish is cool enough to handle, peel the skin off with a knife and your fingers.  Remove the meat from the top half of the tail.  Remove the spine bones.

Turn that baby over and remove the skin from the bottom half.

Break the fish up into bite-sized pieces.   Chop the reserved thyme into little pieces.

When the poaching liquid is thickened enough, remove the old pieces of thyme.

Depending on your pot, add the pasta to the sauce or the sauce to the pasta.  Add in the salmon and the fresh thyme.

Gently stir or give it a toss to mix through.

Enjoy!  This will feed at least three, possibly four, hungry people.