Eggplant

Eggplant has a chewy, spongy texture and meaty flavor that makes for very satisfying vegetarian entrees, as well as a flavorful addition to meaty stews.
All summer, I roast them in mixtures with other seasonal vegetables, from the first summer squashes through to butternut season. I don’t peel them for roasting, though I like the texture of eggplant in casseroles like moussaka and eggplant parmigiana better when it is peeled.

There are two kinds of eggplants: the Asian and the Italian varieties. I prefer the long, skinny, Asian eggplants for roasting, because they have almost no seeds and so have a superior texture. When I'm making a casserole, I go for the more familiar (to me) Italian style eggplants, which are about the size and shape of a butternut squash: up to a foot long, and usually with a shiny black skin, although both Italian and Asian eggplants come in colors from milky white through purple to black.
Eggplant parmigiana doesn’t have to be drenched in melted mozzarella. I made some recently that was very good, and proof that you only need a small shaving of Parmesan cheese to top this dish. The richness comes from the fried eggplant. Between the crumb coating and the creamy eggplant, it has a satisfying, comforting texture. For a light meal, I serve it as the main dish with some salad or cooked greens.
To make a heartier meal, it’s terrific as an eggplant parm hero on Italian bread. Toast the bread and eggplant parm serving separately, then assemble the sandwich.
I make my own breadcrumbs. I only eat good bread, and I don’t want to eat the toasted, broken leftovers of who knows what kind of white bread, that is sold in cans in the grocery store. I save the heels of bread loaves, or any that’s threatening to go stale, in the freezer. When I have a bunch of bread scraps, I cube the bread, then pulse the frozen bread cubes in the food processor until it’s a coarse meal. I freeze the crumbs and grab a handful whenever I need them: for breading and frying cutlets, to go in meatloaf or on top of a casserole. I
also make my own tomato sauce, especially at this time of year when I can make it from fresh. Use your favorite kind. A nice fresh marinara with herbs is a good choice.
This is great as an entree with a side of greens, or as a light, starchy side dish.

Eggplant parmigiana

Makes 4 servings as an entree.
Doubling Notes: This recipe may be doubled. Use a larger casserole dish. Baking time will be about 15 minutes longer.
Ingredients:
1 large Italian eggplant (about a pound), peeled and sliced into ¾-inch rounds
3 cups of fresh breadcrumbs
1 ½ tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup fresh oregano, finely minced
5 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely minced
3 eggs
2 cups or more of fat for frying: a high-heat oil like sunflower or safflower oil, rendered lard, or ghee
2 cups tomato sauce
Equipment Needed:
A food processor (to make bread crumbs)
A wide skillet with high sides for frying
Two pie plates
An oven-safe casserole dish (8”x8” is large enough for one eggplant; 8”x14” is large enough for two)

1. In a wide skillet, heat the fat over a high flame.
2. Beat the eggs with half a teaspoon of salt and ¼ tsp of black pepper in a pie plate.
3. Mix together the breadcrumbs, remaining salt and pepper, oregano, and garlic in another pie plate, sifting them together with your hands to keep the mixture light.
4. Use your fingers and a fork to dip a slice of eggplant into the egg mixture, then turn it over to coat both sides of the slice.
5. Move the slice directly to the bread crumb mixture, pressing the slice gently into the crumbs. Turn the slice over to coat both sides as completely as possible with an even coating of breadcrumb mixture.
6. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
7. When the fat is very hot, lay a prepared slice of eggplant in the skillet. Prepare additional slices of eggplant in the same manner and lay them in the skillet, close but not touching. Adding the slices one at a time keeps the oil hotter, which fries the slices more crisply.
8. Fry each slice for a few minutes, until golden brown, then flip the slice to fry the other side.
9. Remove to a plate covered in paper towels to drain. Separate layers of fried eggplant with several paper towels.
10. When all of the eggplant is fried, place a single layer of fried slices on the bottom of an oven-safe casserole dish. Top each slice with a tablespoon or two of tomato sauce, and a small sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese. Put another layer of eggplant on top: I like to stagger the slices but it’s not important. Continue to build the layers of eggplant, sauce, and cheese until you run out of eggplant. If you want to freeze the dish or store it to serve later, cover and refrigerate or freeze it now.
11. Bake the dish for about 20-30 minutes, or until the cheese on top melts. Serve hot.

How to care for an iron skillet

Iron skillets, being old-timey relics, attract folk wisdom to them like they're magnetic. There are recipes on their curing, and lengthy rituals for seasoning a new skillet abound in the lore.

One thing those who cook in iron will agree upon is that you can't rush experience. The process of making a new skillet non-stick is not unlike breaking in a new sous chef. Start out by practicing, then give it progressively more challenging tasks until it's frying your eggs every morning like a champ. Treat it like it's special, enabling it to do its job in its inimitable way, because it is an original. Is treating a cast iron skillet differently from all your other cookware too much to ask for a non-stick surface that doesn't come to you care of the chemical labs of DuPont? I don't think so.

I learned to care for cast iron from my first mother-in-law, an excellent home cook who grew up in a large, rural family during the Depression. Many of her standards had clearly not varied from the days when she prepared them on a wood stove. She scrambled eggs in a cast iron skillet in the morning, and baked cornbread in the same skillet every night. When I set up my own kitchen, I got a small skillet, which I still use every day. I have a larger one, too, for bigger jobs.

I put my other pots and Pyrex through the dishwasher. Large items that don't fit, I wash in the sink with hot soap and water. For cast iron, I follow a different method, and clean the skillet the same way I watched my mother-in-law clean hers. After rinsing and squeezing any remaining dish soap from the sponge, I wash the skillet gently, not using the scrubby side of the sponge if I can help it, because this removes the non-stick finish that I build up by seasoning my skillet after every use. When it's clean, I set it on the stove and dry it over a high heat. When all of the water has evaporated and the skillet begins to smoke, I turn off the heat and pour in about a teaspoon of high-heat oil such as sunflower oil, and rub it in all over the bottom and sides of the inside of the skillet with a paper towel. After the skillet cools, I put it away.

When I buy a brand new skillet, I do the same thing: wash it gently without soap, heat it to smoking, and oil it. At first, the coating this makes is very thin and not as non-stick as it will become over time, with use. Literally, using the skillet to cook seasons it, and this cleaning method seasons it more evenly and thoroughly. When your iron skillet looks like mine, black and shiny with use, it will release omelets, sear steaks, and allow you to sauté and shallow-fry anything with ease.

Local tomatoes

Vine-ripe tomatoes (even the green ones, a zebra type, are fully ripe) destined for the sauce pot

From age 12 to 26, I lived on the Gulf coast of Florida. For most of that time I was about an hour south of Tampa, in farm country. The entrance to my parents’ new housing development faced cow pasture; continuing past the development away from the highway, railroad tracks crossed the road and beyond that, within a mile of the house, the road went to dirt.The area developed rapidly. By the time I moved out at 18, the road was paved all the way to the turn off to my friend’s house: a golf course had gone up, just past the railroad tracks. When I took my partner to Florida several years ago, he wanted to see an alligator. A large specimen, spotted in the national park, while at excitingly close range, laid too still to engender much awe in the Yankee. One night, we drove past the golf course in a thunderstorm. Inching along the road in a total downpour, windshield wipers on maximum speed, we stopped just short of a small alligator crossing the road. It lashed its tail menacingly at us before continuing on its way to the golf course. Now he was impressed.

Living in rural Florida was strange, to a family of Italian-Americans from Long Island. We ventured out as a group at first, and like Americans in a foreign land, sought out the familiar, however debased the local version. Rural Floridian pizza is soundly disappointing, and not even available by delivery. On weekends, we went to the beach and the laundromat. In the evening, showered and sunburned, the whole family snuck candy into the dollar theater. “My Cousin Vinny” had us roaring in recognition of ourselves.

A quarter mile down the road from our new home, I picked wild oranges and ate them. Despite warnings of sour wild fruit, I found they were sweet, and savored the exotic flavor of orange juice, hot from the sun. Two more miles by bicycle on dirt roads took me to my closest friend’s door. Her family kept goats, and her brother slept in a trailer parked in the yard. Several of my friends were distressingly poor. I learned quickly that some of the students in my middle school didn’t speak English, and some didn’t even speak Spanish, only Quechua. They disappeared before the school year ended, the children of migrant workers.

Our area’s principal agricultural products were dairy, oranges, and tomatoes. On the school bus into town, we passed the tomato packing plant where some of my classmates’ parents worked. Later, as a student assistant on an agricultural research extension farm, I experienced the “lite” version of farm labor, picking small fields of tomatoes that my boss grew in order to report differences among the cultivars. I learned that tomatoes grow in hands, ripening from the bottom hand up, so that as we picked the same field subsequent times, the ripe tomatoes grew higher.

This zebra tomato is striped dark and light green; the light green color on a typical red (when ripe) tomato indicates that the fruit is mature, and will ripen off the vine. The dry cracks visible on this fruit are another common attribute of heirloom varieties that has been bred out of commercially grown tomatoes.

I learned a trick for removing the stubborn green stain that even Lava soap couldn’t touch: a green tomato, crushed with one's fingers works as a cleanser in the field. After picking, I helped grade tomatoes, watching them move through the apparatus of wide belts full of holes of different sizes, through which the tomatoes fell into chutes, and were collected in bushel buckets.

Vine-ripened paste tomatoes

We counted and weighed the fruit—I came to think of tomatoes more as fruit. Of course I already knew that botanically, a tomato is a fruit, but I came to know them well enough to understand they're like other fruit. The fruits of the garden are like tree fruits: sweet, and full of seeds. As they ripen, their color becomes brighter and the flesh softer, and the seeds become more easily separated from the flesh.

Tomatoes grew so thick on the vine at my farm’s unlimited u-pick this week, I marveled that anyone had any trouble finding them. Yet I heard people giving directions to one another on where to look. I collected about ten pounds of tomatoes in two yards of row, all within a foot of the earth. Later pickings won’t be this abundant. Living in Florida, I saw surplus tomatoes dumped into cow pastures, and the cattle eating them contentedly.

As a young newlywed, I brought home buckets of tomatoes from the farm where I worked and turned them into sauce. All of my female relatives who made their own used canned, so working with fresh fruit was an experiment. Simmering the sauce all day is ritual, and utterly essential. Canned tomatoes are already skinned: you can blanch and then shock fresh tomatoes with cold water to loosen the skins, or roast the tomatoes and allow them to cool so the skins can be plucked out before simmering them into sauce. At the end of the day, an immersion blender will fix a lot of things.

Of the tomatoes I brought home, a few are clearly green. Kevin remarked on this but I assured him that they will ripen. The research farm where I worked duplicated the practices of conventional agriculture, including frequent spraying against pests, and picking the fruit while they were still “mature green”: a lighter shade that indicates the tomato will fully ripen off the vine, yet is firm enough to withstand transportation. Back in Palmetto, Florida, along the roadsides in tomato season, thrifty people collect green tomatoes that have fallen from dump trucks. Here in western Massachusetts, nearly all of my tomatoes were quite ripe. I trucked them home as carefully as I could on a bicycle, with no mishaps, and had discarded any tomatoes with cracked skins at the farm, but the next morning, I found a couple that had been squashed beyond usability at the bottom of my bags.

A couple of large heirloom tomatoes and a lot of paste tomatoes. A few are "mature green," and the rest are not yet fully ripe.

Heirloom tomatoes

If you’re looking to pawn off your heirlooms on someone, look no further. As a mostly-locavore, I enjoy fresh tomatoes in high summer, and at no other time of the year. While some will timidly suggest that perhaps the tomatoes available in the supermarket in March can occasionally disappoint, I will tell you clearly: those tomatoes are awful. Don’t buy them. Bland and mealy, they’re probably why I spent the first half of my life sure that I disliked raw tomatoes. I liked tomato sauces and ketchup, but those pale, watery fruits tasted to me like they grew under fluorescents, and they still do.

It’s why the last couple of years of blight struck me, too, and why I’m so grateful to bring home pounds of gorgeous tomatoes from my farm share this year. Their odd shapes and colors, and tendencies toward cracking, signal tomatoes that have been not been bred for their uniformity or shipping qualities, or their ability to be ripened by gassing. These are some of the same varieties of tomatoes that we grew fifty or a hundred years ago, before we shipped them cross-country, with rich, sweet, old-fashioned flavor and meaty texture. I favor dark colors: browns and purples for sauces, red for eating raw.

When you choose heirloom tomatoes, and no other, the anticipation is sweet, and even the nutritional payoff is greater: an heirloom tomato, grown in soil that hasn’t been destroyed with conventional farming practices, vine ripened and eaten just days after harvest, is higher in vitamins and minerals than the standard, conventional, flavorless alternative available the rest of the year. The newer varieties, in golden orange shades, are higher in vitamin A, but with a milder flavor that signals less of the sour ascorbic acid—vitamin C—that tomatoes are known for.

I treasure each tomato and plan to eat them as they reach their peak of ripeness. They sit in a cool place, never in the refrigerator, as this makes them mealy. I eat them on salad, or as salad, and cook them into dishes. Since I have more than enough tomatoes for raw eating this week, I might make “fishy pasta.” Start some water for pasta, and get to chopping.

Mince and sauté half an onion and some garlic. Add a pound of chopped fresh tomatoes and brown them if you can, but if they’re just too juicy, cook them down. You can add some red wine and simmer it off, if you like. When the tomatoes are good and saucy, add the contents of a couple of short cans of fish: tuna, salmon, mackerel, sardines. A few anchovies are a tasty addition. If you have some roasted vegetables in the fridge, add those, too. When the fish is hot, finish with fresh chopped basil and parsley.

Usually the fish make it salty enough, but check it anyway. Serve over pasta with a grating of pecorino, and a grinding of black pepper.

How to learn to cook from cookbooks

People can’t afford to eat healthy, the headline says, but when I read more closely, I find the numbers saying something else. In fact, only a small percentage of people say they can’t afford to eat the kinds of foods they would like to eat. I consider the cost of groceries against the alternatives to cooking my own food: eating out, or buying prepared food.

Since money’s not the issue for most people, they’re choosing to buy worse food than they could be buying to stay healthy. What is the real barrier to access, if you can get to a grocery store and afford to buy good quality food? I think there are two things that stop people from eating as well as they know they should, and the first one is that people think there’s not enough time to make good food. People are genuinely busy, and their days are already full. Until we’re so enlightened a country as to offer the working people simple, healthy food at government-subsidized prices, we’ll just have to tackle the other barrier: culinary confidence.



The cheapest, most nutritious foods you can buy are simple ones you can cook yourself, but that we’re losing the knowledge of how to prepare. Food preparation is fascinating to everyone, at a time when the art of home cooking is imperiled. My mother didn’t learn how to cook from her mother: she learned how to cook from boxes and cans, so that’s what I learned. I had to pass through some other apprenticeships to learn the basics of feeding myself cheaply. If there’s no one to teach you, you can teach yourself. Learn to cook just one dish that you know you enjoy eating. Then learn another one. It’s not an all or nothing business, cooking for yourself.

The best kind of culinary confidence is being able to work with whatever you have, even without a recipe. That comes as you learn the techniques that you can apply to categories of foods. But even experienced cooks like reference materials. If you’re new to cooking, you will want at least one good, encyclopedic cookbook. The kind of cookbook you need to get started will teach you how to do basic things like fry an egg, soak and cook beans, make rice, or sear a steak. They’ll continue to serve you for years, every time you want to bake a cake or some bread.

Most cookbooks on the market will fall to one or the other side of the encyclopedic cooking reference. On one end there are themed collections of recipes, which are usually of limited utility for someone who’s learning how to cook. They have their place, but you’ll know from the title, or a glimpse through the pages, if the flavors appeal to you and the techniques are at your skill level. Most of my shelf is taken up with themed cookbooks: I consult Claudia Roden on Middle Eastern food, and have several volumes of Indian cooking, but my favorite is by Madhur Jaffrey. Someday when I want to cook even more slow food than I do now, I have a daunting volume of Mexican cookery that I will delve into.

To the other side of the cookbook spectrum are the kind that I typically avoid: the mainstream, “healthy” cookbook. It’s usually full of advice on how to structure your diet so as to remove all of the things they think you shouldn’t eat, like animal fat and salt, and the recipes are usually pretty horrible as a result, so it manages both to avoid teaching basic cookery, and also to avoid teaching you to make even one solid dish that you’d want to make again. You can see why this would not qualify as a culinary confidence builder.

What cookbook should a new cook buy? Go thrifting, and keep an eye out for the gingham-checked “Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook,” which might be familiar from kitchens of your childhood. It’s still a good reference. My favorite go-to for marinades, quick breads, and stews is Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything,” but if the big yellow book is scaring you, there’s a smaller, “Basics” version that’s cheaper. For whole wheat baking and charts on cooking times for bulk food items, I recommend “Laurel’s Kitchen,” a vegetarian cooking reference guide.

Using more of the plant

The closer you are to growing your own, the more you can take advantage of every edible portion of the plant. When I read "That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner", it got my wheels spinning. I like the idea of making a chic little salad out of shredded broccoli stems, and I should save more of my peelings for stock: I have plans to work on my vegetable stock repertoire as the season progresses, and already have a few items stashed away in my freezer. The Purple Kale blog has a few "Otherwise, Trash" posts, dedicated to using what would otherwise be compost, but the recipe I wanted to play with, for a cold corn soup made with a corn cob stock, is from their workshop. I had fresh corn and wanted a light, summer soup. I made the stock, and as I do when I’m making chowder, sauteed some minced onions in bacon fat. After simmering for a couple of hours, the stock hadn’t reduced by much, and I was all out of potatoes, so I improvised (as we do). I pureed some of the corn into some of the stock, then returned it to the pot I was making the soup in. I also added some of the herb mix I’d chopped for a pan of roasted vegetables that afternoon, and was sprinkling on everything: parsley, basil, rosemary, and thyme. I finished it off with half and half and a pat of butter.
I still have the other half of the corn stock in my freezer. I’m sure it’ll find its way into something.
As for the rest of the tips in the NYT article, I would not oven dry whole orange peels, pith and all, because the white part is so bitter, but it’s a good idea to zest citrus and save the zest if your citrus is getting soft and you don’t have an immediate use for it. But why do you need a separate recipe for chard ribs? I always cook them with the leaves: they’re very tender. You can even give them a minute or two lead time in the pan before adding the more tender leaves to the chopped stems.

Choosing cuts of meat for the grill or broiler

I worked behind a meat and seafood service counter for three years, and got to know some of my customers' meat purchasing habits. There were the ones who would only buy ribeye, and the people who avoided visible fat like it didn't taste good or something crazy like that. Worst were the ones who wanted a ribeye, with the fat whorls cut out. That's what makes it a ribeye! I was always happy to help someone find a cut with the qualities they were looking for, but there are certain combinations that are hard or impossible to find, like "fast, cheap, and good." As they say, pick two.

My own specialty in cooking meat is finding the cheap cuts that I like to cook with. But you can't just grab any cheap cut, and cook it any way you want, and expect good results every time. Here are a few of my favorite cuts of beef, pork, and lamb for the grill or broiler.

Beef

Top sirloin is the best deal on the whole beef. Lean, moderately tender, and flavorful, it's as close to "fast, cheap, and good" as you can get, without being the cheapest. It doesn't need marinade, just some salt and pepper. A top sirloin steak usually weighs around a pound: enough for three generous servings, since there's almost no waste.

A slightly better cut is the sirloin tip, which is cut from a triangular flap that caps the sirloin. The tip is cut into short, thick steaks that, at their widest, are about half a pound: a nice serving size. But since the tips come in all sizes, and they're a little more tender than regular top sirloin, they're perfect for kebabs. Sirloin is also a good choice to cut up for kebabs.


L-R: Ribeye steak, chuck delmonico, chuck steak

Chuck delmonico steak, or chuck ribeye, is the part of the chuck that was closest to the rib, and still looks like ribeye steak. Don't buy a regular chuck steak: it's not as good tasting, doesn't grill as tender, and is fattier. Chuck delmonico steaks are smaller, leaner, and more flavorful than ribeyes, and can be half the price. These are well worth it for a special weekday meal or to bring camping. No marinade necessary on these, either. Each steak is generally good for one serving.

Hanger steak is becoming more popular, though once is was considered a "butcher's cut," meaning it was one of those odd cuts that aren't numerous enough to make an effort at selling—there are only two steaks on the whole beef—but they're flavorful and easy to cook. The whole hanger piece is two steaks connected by a membrane: lazier meat departments may neglect to remove the tough, white tissue, so if you see it, cut it off. The steaks resemble whole tenderloins, with a coarse grain like brisket. They take a marinade well and are very flavorful, but a little chewy. Cook to medium, allow to rest five minutes, and slice against the grain to serve.

Skirt steak and flank steak are both similar to hanger in their coarse grain and rich flavor. Skirt steak is the original cut for fajitas—fajita means "belt" in Spanish, another word for this cut—and is fattier than flank, which has a finer grain and is fairly lean. Both should be marinated and seared to crackling over a high flame. Skirt is very thin and will cook quickly, but that's okay: you want your skirt more well done than either a sirloin or a flank steak, which are both better on the medium-rare side of the spectrum.

Ground beef is your cheapest grilling option, tasty, and easy to prepare. You can mix ground beef with other ground meats, like lamb and pork, or add flavorful seasonings like minced thyme, basil, garlic, and onion. Seasoned meatballs can be skewered and grilled as kebabs.

Lamb
Shoulder chops are at least as much fun to eat as ribs, and if you can't find enough shoulder chops, add some arm chops to the mix. These cuts are relatively cheap for lamb, flavorful, and with a marinade and the grill, become an exotic feast the whole family will be gnawing off the bones. Like other fatty, gristly cuts, you want to cook them fairly well done.

Leg of lamb is the most elegant and versatile cut. It's so tender that it needs no marinade, and like the beef sirloin, flavorful despite scant marbling. Cut it up into kebabs, grill leg steaks or a whole, boneless leg, butterflied. Leg is good grilled as rare or medium as you like.

Ground lamb, seasoned with herbs and onion, is delicious as a patty or a meatball kebab. Try seasoning the ground meat with mint and green onions, or garlic and rosemary, plus salt and pepper, before forming and grilling.

Pork
Most pork is pretty lean, and easy to dry out. If you grill a tenderloin, use plenty of oil in the marinade. Fatty loin chops, rib or center cut, are also good choices for grilling and broiling. My favorite seasoning for a pork chop is ground coriander.

For a nice, fatty cut, try country-style boneless pork ribs. Traditions vary by culture and region, but the cut I'm talking about should be cut from the shoulder, or butt, and have a generous amount of fat on them. Baste them with barbecue sauce as you grill them on a medium flame. Internal temp should reach at least 140 degrees F. on all cooked products containing pork. Shoot for 150, but don't let it get to 160 or it will be tough and dry.

Ground pork, seasoned with Italian sausage spices like fennel seed and garlic, makes a delicious grilled patty. Try fresh ginger and green onions with a splash of tamari for an Asian-style grilled pork patty.