Turkish Braised Eggplant (Engin's Imam Bayildi)
I swooned the first time I made this. What makes it exceptional? It's hearty, deeply flavorful, lapped in a rich, glossy, savory sauce, spiked with red wine—serious wintertime satisfaction in a bowl. It is everything you want from a stew, from the seductive aroma with which it warms the house as it simmers, to its robust, filling substance and big, distinct ("manly," we might have said in pre-feminist days) chunks of potato and other vegetables. Dried shiitakes absorb the ragout; garlic (and no wimpy amount of it, either) is used almost as a vegetable in its own right. And, though it seems impossible that something so stalwart should be low fat, low fat it is.
This is my version of hearth-roasted chestnuts, which you can also use if you want peeled fresh chestnuts for a recipe. I score the chestnut peels first and soak the chestnuts in water before roasting. The residual water left in the drained chestnuts creates steam in the hot pan, keeping the chestnuts from drying out and making them easier to peel.
This method is used all around the Mediterranean to cook winter and spring vegetables such as leeks in this recipe, artichokes, cardoons, celery, celery root, fat green beans, favas, and white turnips. The vegetables turn creamy within while remaining firm enough to hold their shape. The method also sweetens slightly bitter vegetables, such as cardoons, by caramelizing them ever so slightly.
The Lazy Front Porch Supper menu includes: Pickled Red Onions with Cilantro, Corn and Haricots Verts in Lime Shallot Butter, Heirloom Tomatoes with Bacon, Blue Cheese and Basil, Shellfish Watermelon Ceviche, Grilled Steaks with Red Chile Sauce, and Fresh Fig Tart with Rosemary Cornmeal Crust and Lemon Mascarpone Cream.
Eggplant gets kind of mushed up as it cooks in the hobo pack, which actually turns out to be a good quality, particularly if it’s getting mushed up with tomatoes and garlic.
This Latin-inspired hobo pack features one of our favorite Caribbean tubers, the yuca (pronounced yook-ah). Also knows as manioc or cassava, yuca is shaped like a long, narrow sweet potato. Its rough outer skin looks like scaly bark, often thickly coated with wax applied to keep it fresh during shipping. When cooked, the stark-white flesh has a slightly sweet, rather buttery flavor and a somewhat glutinous, chewy texture that works particularly well in situations like a hobo pack. Yuca takes a bit of preparation before you can combine it with the other ingredients, since it has both an underskin and a fibrous central core, both of which need to be removed.
Scallions come in many shapes and sizes, from tiny and red to thick and green and very, very long. A stack at the St. Paul market labeled "table onions" were nearly as long as King Alfred leeks and just as sweet. Potatoes are, of course, delicious with leeks, so you can expect they'd be good with scallions, and they're a perfect vehicle for herbs, whether bracing parsley, a handful of chervil, tarragon, or whatever herb you love.
Ingredients
Cooking watery or fibrous root vegetables like celery roots, turnips, carrots, rutabagas, and beets with a little white rice ensures that they will be exceptionally creamy and have a very pure flavor.