EGGPLANT CAPONATA

Sebastian and I also picked up some eggplants today, and because these also don't keep for too long we used them to make caponata for dinner. In addition to the eggplants, we also used vine ripe tomatoes, uncured yellow onions, music garlic, butter, and fresh oregano from the farmers market. Sebastian took all the photos above, which I absolutely love. The caponata still isn't perfect, but it's getting there. I'm taking Sebastian to Casa Nona so we can establish a caponata benchmark.

Third attempt at caponata:

I've made caponata with four different types of eggplants -- large dark round purple American, large round paler purple Sicilian, small longer dark ones, small longer paler purple ones. The best so far are the small dark ones from the farmer's market. I think they are Italian eggplants. The farmer's market person claimed that the small dark and lights were the same, but the dark tasted better to me and they had a slightly greener and firm flesh when raw. Below is how I want to make caponata the next time around.

Chop four smaller longer dark eggplants into half inch cubes. Toss with a sparing amount of olive oil (what might seem like barely enough to coat a fifth of the eggplant pieces) and a generous amount of freshly ground salt. Cook at 400 degrees in a single layer on an oiled surface until browned. Ideally, chop two small spring onions plus the green stems OR if this is not available, half a yellow (or other not sweet) onion and some green onions. Cook in olive oil until starting to color and then add two cloves of minced garlic. Before the garlic starts to burn, deglaze the pan with a splash of sherry vinegar. Add the roasted eggplant plus all the browned bits that stick. Cook briefly but do not overcook. Add two small very ripe chopped tomatoes that have been salted. Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes to taste. Mix in chopped basil and oregano. Serve over small rounds of bread toasted until golden brown in butter and olive oil and rubbed with garlic.

Note: the version I made today included balsamic vinegar, dried thyme, and chopped dried sour cherries. I thought the thyme was distracting and Sebastian thought the balsamic and cherries made the taste too sweet. Thus the absence of these ingredients in my "next time" recipe. I've also tried serving the caponata with fresh mint leaves and have considered adding toasted pine nuts, but I think that it would just be too many competing flavors if you're using fresh ingredients. With fresh ingredients, you can already taste the eggplant, tomato, onion, etc.

ASIAN CUCUMBER SALAD

Sebastian and I went to the Dupont Circle farmers market today. We picked up some small persian cucumbers that don't last very long, so we ate them today for lunch.

I've almost got these cucumbers right:

This is the third time I've made these cucumbers. They are inspired by crunchy Japanese cucumber salads that are usually a little sweet, spicy, sour and have a hint of toasty sesame seed oil (I love this combination of tastes). The last one I had was at the Ramen place Ippudo in New York. This preparation is based on a recipe for a Thai cucumber salad. I think using a coarser salt is important otherwise the salt dissolves and sort of disappears into the juices that get left at the bottom of the bowl.

Peel cucumbers. Split lengthwise and chop into bite sized pieces. Toss with a generous amount of coarse salt, pepper, a dash of red pepper flakes, and a not too heavy drizzle of sesame seed oil. Stir a generous amount of sugar into not too much rice vinegar and add this as well. Throw in some chopped cilantro if you have it.

Best eaten in silence to better enjoy the satisfying crunching cucumber sounds.

Waiting at 20th and O by these lilac and raspberry flower trees.

PASTA LUNCH

The easiest lunch or dinner to make is pasta with the homemade tomato sauce sitting in your fridge. A few things like fresh basil, grated parmesan, and some finishing salt brings it up a notch to a super lunch. I have been eating some version of this meal almost daily for the past week because I love the tomato sauce so much.

Pasta and tomato sauce plus:

While the pasta is cooking in salted water, heat up the tomato sauce, chop a handful of basil leaves into thin strips, and grate good parmesan using the coarse sized grate. When the pasta is done, drain well, then spoon on sauce, sprinkle cheese, throw on the basil. Admire the incredible colors of cream colored pasta, bright lively red sauce, green basil, and curls of white cheese. Before eating, mix all together and salt to taste.

Recommend eating in the sun with a refreshing glass of home brewed iced tea.

CAPRESE and CAPONATA

After reading Blood, Bones, and Butter by Prune chef Gabrielle Hamilton I was completely inspired to cook simple, summer ingredients Italian for Alexa and Sima. These girls are also seriously sophisticated New Yorker foodies who like to eat light and tasty and green market fresh (like most New York foodies). I decided to go with a couple small dishes. Right now eggplant and tomatoes are in season, so I constructed dinner around these these ingredients.

A way to eat mozzarella di bufala:

I first fell in love with creamy, silken, wet, fresh mozzarella in a Caprese salad at Cipriani's downtown. If you start with the real thing, it's pretty hard to mess up, so I like to buy my own rather than spend $27.95 for a tiny plate of the stuff in Soho. The idea of pairing the cheese with balsamic vinegar comes from Gemma where they use a thick, dark, sweet version that tastes more like sin than vinegar.

Find mozzarella made from buffalo milk. Nothing else is the same. Cut into thirds. Place a slice on each plate. Ideally one would have super aged balsamic vinegar or time to have reduced a regular bottle into really thick syrup. Add whatever you have in an artful drizzle around the mozzarella disk. Slice ripe summer tomatoes into thick slices. Add three to four to each plate, covering any parts of the balsamic vinegar that did not land on the plate so artfully. Sprinkle a little salt over the tomato (a slightly coarse sea salt would be good), grind pepper on top of both the tomato and mozzarella, garnish with basil leaves. Admire the piece of geometric color art you've made.

Best eaten by candlelight with some bluish flowers (like hydrangeas) nearby to offset the golden flame and compliment the warmly lit red, white, and green on the plate.

Eggplant Caponata:

The benchmark caponata is Casa Nona's, and my obsession with all things involving smushed eggplant plus other stuff began in Romania when I first tried zacusca. I was lucky that this zacusa had been made by someone's grandmother. Oh my god, I brought back a single mason jar of the stuff to Cambridge and proceeded to ration myself to one spoonful a day over Easter term. I have ever since been searching for that flavorful, fresh vegetables sweet, sort of smoky taste.

I'm not going to say much because the caponata didn't come out exactly as I wanted, and wasn't as good as the first time I made it. I combined an Alice Waters Roasted Eggplant recipe with a Mario Batali caponata recipe. All I will note are the things I would change. Next time, use farmer's market eggplants and onions (I used an American and a Sicilian from Fairway and they were just okay), diced tomato instead of tomato sauce, no cinnamon, more vinegar, and less cooking time on the stove. Chunky is better than mushy.

This meal is of course best eaten with lovely beautiful friends.

LAMB BURGERS

After no one could make dinner, I found myself long three pounds of meat meant for meatballs, one pound each of beef, rose veal, and lamb. Vassili offered up his grill, and so that's how I ended up devouring lamb burgers up on a breezy roof near Chinatown with a young Greek Austrian and his fellow McGill, fellow American school, Moroccan roommate Jais. The little packages of bread and grilled meat tasted so good that we scarfed them down while standing next to the grill instead of sitting down a few feet away on the large summery lounge furniture.

What to do with an extra pound of ground lamb meat:

Vassili had never heard of lamb burgers. I think I had my first one at Prime 16 in New Haven. This version keeps the flavors fresh by roughly chopping the ingredients, gently mixing, and not overcooking.

Mince a small onion, finely chop one large clove of garlic, measure out three very generous tablespoons of parsley and mint (we used fresh mint that had been dried and so crumbled very easily). Add these tasty ingredients to a medium bowl, add the ground lamb meat, crack an egg on top, salt very generously (very generously) and pepper. Mix together gently just enough to incorporate everything taking care not to squeeze or work the meat too much and think light and fluffy thoughts. Form into small not too fat patties and arrange on a plate. Then, place a small bit of butter on each patty, pour a few drops of olive oil on top of this, and then lightly drench each small meat mound in red wine. Heat up the grill, brush with olive oil, grill the burgers for long enough on one side to get a little charred before flipping. For the bread, we used whole wheat sandwich bread lightly doused with olive oil on both sides, generously sprinkled with dried Greek oregano on one side, and toasted on the grill until browned. Apparently oregano grows everywhere in Greece. Our only condiments were sliced tomatoes.

Best eaten around sunset on roof that feels cool because of the breeze even though it's actually quite hot, being DC in the summer.

BASIC TOMATO SAUCE

I offered to cook dinner at my place for the other dissertation interns -- three grad students and one honorary member who just graduated from college, all guys, all personalities and characters, they cover california, korea, india, greece, vienna, diplomats, brahmans, jews, the army, aspirations to be a stand up comedian, health nuts, and every day in our refrigerator of a shared office is like an episode from an oddball sitcom -- tomorrow night. I've been trying to simplify the cooking, so tomato sauce, meatballs, and garlic bread (with green butter) seems not too hard. I might also throw in a salad, we'll see. Right now the sauce is simmering away and hopefully will achieve the "hot cereal" consistency that will signal it is done. The tastes I've been licking off the wooden stirring spoon are getting sweeter and tastier. Hmmm.

My first tomato sauce:

My experiment of a sauce is a combination of a recipe from Orangette based on butter and onions and Mario Batali's basic sauce. I decided to use fresh tomatoes because how could I not? My subconscious inspirations (I later realized after taking my first bite of the sauce) are the dishes I've loved with large chunks of soft tomato in them. I'm thinking of pasta pomodoro in Venice and lasagna from Mario's on the Main Street in Lexington, MA.

First peel the tomatoes by placing in boiling water until the skin begins to break, then immediately transfer to a shocking cold ice water bath. Let sit for a moment, then peel off the skins. I used 19 bright red tomatoes on the vine. In a large pot, use medium heat to get a quarter cup of olive oil and five big spoonfuls of butter hot enough. Quarter two vidalia onions and add to the pot. Let the onions get sort of soft and start falling apart into individual layers. Add 4-5 cloves of mashed and sliced garlic and one small finely grated carrot. Stir and enjoy how good it smells. Add a fair amount of fresh thyme leaves. Stir some more. Then add the tomatoes. Stir and mash the tomatoes a bit (I also halved them using a knife) and bring the mixture to a boil. Then lower the heat to a simmer. Let the sauce keep simmering and stir occasionally. I also recommend tasting as you go along because the flavor really does change and develop. After the sauce has thickened, remove and throw out the onions. I plan on adding fresh basil as a garnish tomorrow.

Best prepared in a kitchen lit by the last of the day's sunlight that makes the ingredients simply glow bright red, orange, and yellow.

Update a few days later. My first bite into sweetly saturated chunky tomato gives me a pleasure like eating vegetable candy and immediately reminds me of a pasta pomodoro I ate as many times as I could one winter in Venice at the only humble restaurant in town that also had good food. The dish consisted simply of pasta and fresh tomatoes cooked in some way that retained all the best parts of a tomato and remains one of my favorite things I've ever eaten in Italy. Before that experience, I had no idea that a pasta dish could be so simple. I remember my skepticism and then wonder and admiration. I've been eating the sauce spooned over spaghetti with grated pecorino romano and a big pinch of a pink Himalayan finishing salt that Corina sent me from Chicago.

KUMQUATS AND PINEAPPLE GUAVA FLOWERS

There is an indescribable satisfaction and pleasure and feeling of really living that comes with eating a freshly picked anything. In this case, the garden at the avocado farm contained a kumquat bush and a pineapple guava plant. The kumquats had sugary sweet skins that compressed and then yielded to teeth with a gentle burst of slightly tart kumquat juice. The pineapple guava flowers tasted like flowers. These were the first flowers I had ever eaten. They tasted like guava. Sweet and fruit. I imagine my reaction was similar to how the kids at Charlie's Chocolate Factory felt when they licked the boisenberry picture on the fruit wallpaper and it tasted like a boisenberry.

BRUSCHETTA

Summer creates tomatoes and tomatoes demand to be combined with basil and eaten on bread. I have eaten and made bruschetta a few times. The innovation in this version was entirely in the bread. Slicing the bread into small rounds with only a little crust makes it possible to literally pop an entire bruschetta into one's mouth and savor everything wonderful about sweet heirlooms, spicy raw garlic, fresh basil, olive oil and a hint of butter all in one bite. Genius. Dexter gets credit for this brilliant bread idea. I usually slice the bread lengthwise leaving a lot of hard crust to maneuver with each bite.

My current favorite version of bruschetta:

Vanessa fed me my first really good bruschetta. She's Swiss Italian and knows the secret of toasting the bread and then rubbing raw garlic cloves on it. I also try to imagine what the versions at Frank and Zampa taste like when I am adjusting the amounts of each ingredient.

Chop tomatoes that smell like tomatoes and have real tomato flavor. This may mean waiting until the summer. I used a mixture of heirlooms in dark purples, oranges, golden yellows, and paler reds plus regular bright red tomatoes on the vine. Mix well with a good olive oil, fresh ground salt, fresh ground pepper, and a good amount of chopped fresh basil leaves. A bunch of fresh basil will be quite happy stored like flowers in a glass of water. Let this bowl of goodness sit for at least 20 minutes. In the meantime, slice a good baguette that has tender innards, not mealy or starchy or crumbly white but pliable with plenty of air holes, into small rounds. I prefer firehook and breadline to le pain quoditien and whole foods. Toast the rounds in a pan coated in a butter and olive oil mixture until one side is a saturated, crispy golden brown. Let the other side cook just long enough to be warm. While still hot, rub raw garlic cloves all over the brown sides of the bread like grating cheese. Rub, rub, rub. Heap tomatoes onto the bread. Fit as many bruschetta as you can onto a plate. Start eating. Incredible.

Best eaten with fingers. Savor the garlicy, salty, buttery taste.

RAINBOW SWISS CHARD

An explosion of magentas, oranges, bright pinks, reds, and yellows all in a bunch has the power to stop me in my tracks on a Sunday morning. There is nothing I can do but take the colors home with me. I am still learning how to store green things (for example, my cucumbers and mint and cilantro completely shriveled and died after a few days) so the swiss chard started outside of the fridge, then went inside the fridge unwrapped, then got wrapped in a plastic bag with a small opening at the top. Even under these conditions the leaves stayed pretty healthy and were able to inspire a simple Thursday dinner for Trey, Snaebjorn, and Jennifer.

Swiss chard Italian style:

I think I ate swiss chard for the first time at Malcolm and Eden's. They made a rich swiss chard, white bean, and tomato concoction to spoon over polenta. Eaten alongside a grilled sausage from Nica's, this meal was completely delicious and inspirational. Who knew swiss chard was so bitter, creamy, and sweet all at the same time? And who knew swiss chard tasted so amazing with crispy, browned sausage?

Cook an entire chopped vidalia onion plus chopped green onion stems from some spring onions in butter and olive oil until slightly translucent. Add three mashed and diced cloves of garlic. Add sliced spicy sausage salami (or real sausage if I had it) and try to get the meat as lovely and brown as possible. Dump in a can of diced tomatoes. Let the whole thing bubble for about 20 minutes. When close to eating, stir in the chopped swiss chard stems only. When they are close to done but not done, throw in the swiss chard leaves roughly cut plus a can of cannellini beans. Let the leaves wilt a little, but still seem slightly undercooked. Do not let the leaves overcook. Now either add the pasta which as been cooking this entire time, stir all together, salt and pepper and serve. Or, spoon over polenta. Grating some pecorino romano on top tastes nice.

Best prepared for a not too fussy weekday meals with friends who are happy to be fed. Even better is when one of those friends also brings over small bowls of her homemade blackberry cobbler (topping made of oats, sunflower seeds, sliced almonds, butter, sugar, and flour) for dessert.

EGGS IN BED

Dexter is the egg master. When he makes eggs, the world is a brighter, shinier place. These eggs were made with whatever was in my fridge. Key to the operation were the small purple rounds of raw onion stem scattered on top at the end. The raw onions added a nice bite to go against the mellowed out spiciness from the sausage and the sweetness from the cooked onions. This breakfast fortified us ahead of an epic farm party in Aldie, Virginia.

Scrambled eggs with everything farmers market:

The order of things is unclear, but butter, chopped small white onions, and chopped spicy salami sausage ended up in a pan. Then the beaten eggs. Then some grated cheddar. And voila. Amazing eggs. The onions come with tops and the tops are also good to eat. We chopped the part between where the small globes end and the greens really get flat and green. Here, the plant is still firm and sort of purple and white and green colored and chops beautifully into perfect concentric circles of color. Sprinkle these on top of the eggs.

Best shared with another person in a rather large bed next to a window with morning sunlight streaming in. White sheets and a white plate bring out the colors of the breakfast nicely.

AVOCADO ON BREAD

So over Memorial Day weekend Corina and I went to visit Sebastian in Santa Barbara and ended up staying at an avocado farm. By far, the best part of this trip was waking up every morning and making avocado breakfast, which we then carried outside over to a small deck that looked into the mountains, and proceeded to eat very happily under the strong white California sun.

Original:

Inspiration goes to Cafe Gitane in SoHo where I first had and became a little addicted to avocado toast.

A lot of bacon avocado spread, very generously and only a bit mashed so still quite chunky, onto half of a toasted Costco cheddar cheese bagel. The cheese was stuck to the outside of the bagel so when toasted it got all browned and a little crunchy.

Versions I made for Dexter in DC:

Whole wheat wonderbread from CVS toasted in a pan with a small pat of farmers market butter. Yellow cheddar melted on top and then browned a bit under the broiler.

If you have a pinkerton avocado, spread a lot of this on top of the slightly hardened cheese, fresh ground sea salt, fresh ground pepper, dash of cayenne pepper, and smattering of small circles of a white spring onion from the farmers market arranged to look lovely. The tiny sort that come with greens still attached.

If you have a bacon avocado, pile on the avocado, sprinkle a bit of salt, squeeze a bit of lemon, and dab gray poupon dijon whole grain mustard here and there.

Best eaten in the evening by the light of two red candles sitting next to Dexter.

Seeing more than what is there

bright, white sunlight

crisp, true colors

CBG

I like

horse

shy

bold

beautiful

Souveneirs

The color of food

post processing

a photo does not have to be true

it can be like a painting

an expression

those tomatoes, see what the person can do

L Tan

Limbs askew

red

three types

A Richards, SOS, A Tatou

Girls who are comfortable

in their own skin

a smile makes a difference

Alexandra Richards and Blake Lively