The new season at Gretchen’s Cooking School has been going for a while, but we just had our first volunteer night last week. It was a wine tasting featuring Washington State wines, brought in by James and Brian from Dickerson Distributors.

James picked the wines, trying to go for some blends that people might not have tasted. The wineries were Maryhill, Kiona, Portteus, Cougar Crest and DiStefano, and prices ranged from reasonable to downright cheap. I liked the DiStefano Syrah and the Cougar Crest red blend best, both being typical bold, fruit-forward Washington reds. The Maryhill Chardonnay was unoaked but had an unusual citrus flavor that didn’t quite do it for me, the Kiona red was simple but had a definite rich Red Mountain edge to it, and the Portteus Bistro Red was a very straightforward table wine.

To accompany the wines, the class coordinator had planned an appetizer plate with two kinds of dip (artichoke and corn-chile), then a French dip sandwich au jus and an iceberg wedge with gorgonzola dressing and crumbled bacon. She didn’t realize until we were cooking that pretty much every single item had mayonnaise in it. Not that that’s a problem, except she had to run out and buy another whole jar.

The other downside was that everyone got so full from all the mayo that they hardly had room for the chocolate cake to follow. A very sad story. Good thing there’s always room for wine.

We eat so much grilled eggplant  during the summer (thanks to the nice folks at Hedlin Family Farms) it’s a little embarrassing. Sometimes we dust it with spices first, but usually we just dress it with olive oil, salt and pepper, grill it till it poofs up and turns golden, then eat it in huge heaps with lamb kebabs or whatever else is on the grill that day. In an attempt to do something different with our weekly poundage of eggplant (plus some of the tomatoes which are beginning to take over the deck), I came up with this caponata. And we’ve made it twice in one week, so I guess it worked pretty well.

My approach here is to get all the ingredients except the eggplant mixed together in a big bowl, so all I have to do is take a cutting board down by the grill and dice up the eggplants as they come off the heat. Then I dump them into the dressing and mix everything up together. The flavors sit and blend while we grill the next part of the meal.

This is all eminently adjustable, but here’s what I added to my latest batch:

1. over two pounds of eggplant, grilled and chopped
2. about a cup of garlic-stuffed green olives, roughly chopped
3. all the kalamata olives that were left in the jar, maybe a third of a cup? Also roughly chopped
4. several handfuls of ripe Sungold and Stupice tomatoes from the vines on the deck, halved or quartered depending on size
5. a spoonful or two of capers
6. a good glug of olive oil
7. several good glugs of red wine vinegar
8. a pinch of kosher salt

You could easily add other stuff here according to your own taste and what’s in the fridge at the moment. Onions would be nice, especially grilled, and so would zucchini. I don’t think fresh herbs would go amiss, either – I tried topping some of the caponata with sprigs of fresh basil and that was very nice.

To serve, I can recommend fish: we’ve eaten this with planked salmon and butter-roasted halibut, both excellent. It’s also lovely topping fresh sheep or goat cheese on a bit of baguette, or simply spread on crackers. And I’ll bet it would make a spectacular pizza topping.

I think this calls for more experimentation. What do you put in your caponata?

For the last six months or so there has been a recipe (a clipping from Bon Appetit or some such publication) stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. I guess I somehow thought that if it was out in plain sight I would actually make it – sort of a triumph of optimism over experience. Turns out that staring at something every day doesn’t necessarily inspire you to do something about it…

I did make it, finally, for a middle-eastern themed dinner party we gave recently. Sort of a miracle, really. The recipe was for muhammara, a Syrian puree of roasted red peppers, walnuts and pomegranate molasses, and it seemed so completely up my alley that I can’t believe how long I waited to try it. I’m usually such a sucker for anything with pomegranate molasses. As it turned out, though, I decided not to use the clipping, which called for jarred peppers and panko crumbs. I went with a recipe from Cooking with Amy instead, just tweaking it slightly. Like many dips, this is a very forgiving recipe, so you could adjust it however you wanted.

By the way, this is how I usually roast peppers. I know you get a better flavor by holding them over an open flame and blistering them black, but it’s simpler and more hands-off to cut them in half and put them in a hot oven until the skin blisters. It loses a little of the juice, but you get a more even application of heat. Then it’s easy to rub the skin off.

The only real issue I had making the muhammara was that I was rapidly running out of olive oil (we were using it in everything), so I went a little sparing on it, leading to a dip a bit thicker in texture than I would have liked. Also, I used two red peppers and one orange, which looked beautiful at the market but produced a slightly drab-colored blend – all red is definitely the way to go.

For our dinner party I put this dip out with a bowl of blue corn chips, some toasted pita wedges and a bowl of semolina crackers from the Breadfarm. The slightly sweet, crispy crackers were the winner with the muhammara. Thin baguette slices would also be lovely, I think.

I also found a great-sounding idea in Greg Malouf’s book on Lebanese and Syrian cooking, Saha - it calls for stirring together muhammara and labneh (yogurt cheese). I’ll have to make myself a note to try that sometime, I might get around to it in the next year…

Muhammara

• 3 red bell peppers
• 1 cup walnuts
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs
• 1 Tbsp pomegranate molasses
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp cumin
• hefty pinch red chile flakes, or a fresh hot red chile, chopped
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup olive oil

Roast the peppers and peel them, saving the juices. Lightly toast the walnuts in a skillet and let them cool.

Combine everything but the oil in a food processor. Once it’s blended to a paste, keep the motor running and add the oil in a thin stream. Scrape into a bowl and serve.

Last Saturday we cooked up quite a storm. We were kind of stuck at home, since Jon managed to throw his back out a few days before and was still on a fun variety of medications and spending most of his time on the couch. So why not cook?

To start, I made up a batch of carrot dip. I made this for friends a week ago, and it was so good it vanished instantly, so I wanted to do it again just for the two of us. It’s just roasted carrots pureed with olive oil, salt, fresh mint and a pinch of caraway or cumin seed, served with a sprinkling of feta cheese, and it is great. Plus it did a fantastic job of using up the six-pound bag of carrots we bought at the last farmer’s market.

Then I threw together another recipe from good old Art of Braising, which is rapidly becoming one of those cookbooks that I want to make every single recipe out of. I had tried the “Best Braised Cabbage in the World” already, but I saw a rave about the “Savoy Cabbage Gratin with Saint Marcellin” on Orangette that made me head straight out to the co-op to look for French triple-cream cheeses. I ended up with Delice de Bourgogne, which I thought worked splendidly [huh. I just realized that's what Molly ended up using, too. Weird]. The final dish was smooth and sweet, with a delightful funkiness about it from the cheese. Leftovers have been singularly tasty.

To support the cabbage, then, I invented a pork braise. Years ago, my father came up with a nifty preparation for pork blade steaks (which are excitingly cheap!), roasting them slowly in the oven with lots of preserved lemon and garlic. It occurred to me, though, with all the braising I’ve been doing, that blade steaks should braise wonderfully. So I seared the pork, deglazed the pan with a bit of dry Riesling and some chicken broth, tossed in half a preserved lemon and some slivered garlic, and let it braise for an hour, tossing in some olives partway through. Then I took the pork out and boiled the liquid down into a fabulously unctuous gravy. That’s made pretty darn good leftovers, too.

To go with dinner, we had a bottle of beautifully dry, delicate Riesling from Pacific Rim, and an olive baguette from the Breadfarm.

Then we made brownies.

Think of it as training for Thanksgiving…