Hardly a glamorous name for a dish - actually it’s so unglamorous we sometimes forget how much we like this. A concoction we made up ourselves, it consists only of roasted eggplant, butter, and onions. There are all sorts of other things you could add, but somehow it never seems necessary. Its toasty sweetness goes perfectly alongside spicy Indian food or something simple like a pork chop, or with middle-eastern flavors like lamb kebabs and yogurt.

Baked eggplant is a real revelation if you’ve never tried it. Once the insides are soft, they can be scooped out and added to all sorts of things. Baba ganoush is made this way, or you can stirfry the cooked eggplant with curry spices. It completely gets rid of the eggplant’s bitterness and spongy texture, leaving you with a dish that is both silky and sweet. It’s especially a good thing to do with the big purple grocery store eggplants when you can’t get fresh local ones – we find that the two of us can eat two eggplants very quickly this way.

Eggplant Mush

• 2 large eggplants
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1 onion, diced
• kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 400°. Prick the eggplants all over with a fork, set them on a baking sheet (line it with foil to make cleanup easier) and bake until wrinkled and soft, 30-50 minutes depending on their size. Cut them open lengthwise and let cool slightly.

Melt the butter in a heavy skillet and add the onion. Cook slowly until soft and golden. Scrape the eggplant flesh out of its skin and add it to the onions. Turn the heat to low and cook, stirring frequently, until the eggplant has broken down and incorporated with the onion – perhaps 20 minutes or so. Salt to taste and serve.

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?

While I am, in principle, a big fan of the locavore, 100-mile diet movement, I really don’t think I’m ever going to manage to eat one hundred percent local. I’m very fond of olive oil, for instance. And mangoes. But it does give me a thrill when I realize that everything on my plate was produced within a fifty mile radius of my house. This was a recent dinner of grilled lamb chops, Japanese eggplant and asparagus, all purchased at the downtown farmer’s market.

The eggplants are greenhouse grown by Hedlin Farms over in LaConner, about ten miles away, and the asparagus was from Frog’s Song farm on Fir Island. And the lamb is from Linda Martiny, an enthusiastic raiser of Suffolk sheep from the upper Skagit Valley. She’s been selling cuts of young lamb at the farmer’s market this season, and it’s such wonderful quality that we’ve already ordered a half a lamb from this week’s processing. Can’t wait!

The wine, a Two Mountain red blend from Zillah, WA, is not precisely local – on the other hand, we bought it at the winery last year. The Perrier, of course, is as non-local as you can get. Pity, I was on a roll there. But the flowering branches on the table are from my own Japanese Snowbell tree!

From our own garden, we’ve also been eating our own fresh garlic scapes (shown above, grilled), parsley and tiny ripe strawberries. Now that’s local.

What local foods have you been eating this week?

The Mount Vernon Farmer’s Market had its final day this weekend, so we made sure to go stock up. Squash, carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, beets, peppers, a pumpkin for the porch and a big bunch of dahlias – we did pretty well. There will still be a few farmstands open, of course, but it’s never as easy as the market for getting all our shopping done with one fell swoop. Ah, well.

Before leaving on our market trip, wondering what we might end up having for dinner, I was paging through The Babbo Cookbook by Mario Batali, and found an enticing picture of lamb rib chops dancing around a pile of something green. It was, apparently, a pesto made of broccoli rabe. What a good idea, I thought, I’ll get some at the farmer’s market and try it out! Naturally, not a single booth was offering it…but Blue Heron Farm did have lovely fresh bunches of mizuna, or Japanese mustard greens. Thinking one bitter green might well replace another, we bought a bunch and proceeded to wing the recipe.

While Jon grilled the lamb chops, which I had rubbed with Mario’s recommended blend of lemon zest, fresh mint, salt and pepper, I blanched the mustard greens in boiling water, rinsed them and squeezed them dry. I plopped them in the little food processor with a couple of anchovy filets, a spoonful of capers, two cloves of garlic, a small container of chicken stock (maybe a 1/4 cup?) and some olive oil. It all whizzed together into something more like a soup than a pesto – maybe I didn’t add enough oil? – but which promised to be extremely tasty.

To serve, we had lamb chops and a baked eggplant tian on the plates, then spooned the green sauce around, plus dollops of yogurt mixed with freshly toasted cumin seed. I was astonished – this was really good! The sauce was a touch bitter and spicy, but with the added richness and pungent flavors of the stock, capers and anchovies. It mixed with the yogurt to create an entirely new flavor that made us wish desperately for bread to mop it all up.

I really think this green sauce has possibilities. You could use it to flavor soup, or as a soup in itself. You could make it more pesto-like with the addition of herbs or more olive oil. It could be turned into a salad dressing! It’s a very painless way to eat your greens, and I intend to experiment further.

We wait with great anticipation all year long, waiting for the summer to bring both grilling weather and fresh local eggplant. Once it’s here, we make this recipe repeatedly, regardless of the flavors of the other food we’re eating – it’s just so good.

The recipe is from Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking, although I don’t believe we’ve ever made it quite like the original – it calls for using very small baby eggplants, stuffing them and frying them whole. We prefer slicing slightly larger eggplants (Japanese or Italian, doesn’t matter), coating them in the spices and oil, and grilling them until soft. So all we’ve really borrowed here is the spice blend, and it’s a good one.

This particular batch of eggplants is from our usual source, Hedlin Farms in LaConner. Not only are they purty, but they’re wonderful – firm, sweet and almost seedless. We’re sad every time we go to their stand and they’re out of eggplant.

Grilled Spiced Eggplant

• 1 pound fresh young eggplants
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4-1/2 tsp red pepper
• 1/2 tsp amchoor (mango powder)
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil

Cut the eggplant into thick slices or wedges. Mix all the spices together and combine with the eggplant and the oil. A large bowl or a ziploc bag work well for thorough mixing. Refrigerate until ready to grill.

Grill over charcoal until the eggplant is soft and charred. Blackened is OK, too. Eat hot or cold.

A million years ago (give or take a bit) I spent a few months in Italy as part of a geology course I was taking. We stayed in a tiny village in the Marche region, with occasional field trips elsewhere. We did most of our own cooking, under the supervision of our professors (one Italian and one American), and our diet was pretty repetitive: fresh rolls from the bakery down the road for breakfast, spread with chestnut jam; also cornflakes stirred into blueberry yogurt. Sandwiches for lunch, made from very hard rolls and very ripe pecorino (we referred to it as the Stinky Feet Cheese). Dinner was always, always pasta, but fortunately there was some variation in the toppings, many of which were really delicious. Some of my classmates put together a small recipe book, and I continued to make many of my pasta sauces from this collection for many years afterwards.

One of these sauces that was in my regular rotation was made up of sauteed eggplant mixed with sun dried tomatoes, chopped nuts and mascarpone cheese. It had a great nutty, savory taste and was a nice change from the endless red sauce/pesto rotation. As J and I started to phase out high glycemic foods from our diet I stopped making pasta for dinner as a regular thing, and the eggplant sauce disappeared from the repertoire.

Last week, though, as we were staring vacantly at grocery store produce with very little inspiration, we saw some eggplants that looked halfway decent, and J said, “What about that eggplant walnut sauce you used to make? What if we did it with meatballs?” And so we did.

First, while the oven was preheating for the meatballs, I dumped all of our remaining stock of walnuts onto a baking sheet and toasted them a bit. I almost forgot them, like I always do, but fortunately I smelled them in time. I cooked up half a pound of bowtie pasta (farfalle), drained it and set it aside. I cut the eggplant into strips and sauteed them with some chopped garlic in plenty of olive oil, until they were soft and nicely golden on the edges. I tossed in a handful of julienned sun dried tomato that we had in the freezer, followed by the walnuts. We didn’t have any mascarpone, but there was a little ricotta left from the asparagus tart, so I scraped that in. When this (rather unattractive) mixture was hot through, I stirred in the pasta and mixed it all up well. J made his usual meatballs with plenty of garlic and baked them in the oven, then we piled it all up on plates and dug in.

Our original thought had been to put the sauce directly on the meatballs and not have pasta, but I think it’s better with the noodles. Some things are worth the carbs!

But before all of this other food, I wanted something fun and noshy to go with Prosecco while we worked on dinner, so I cracked open my shiny new copy of  Chocolate and Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier and found a recipe for “gougères au cumin.” Oh yeah – crispy little cheese puffs with a soft melty interior and specks of cumin and black pepper. Easy to make, and they disappeared so fast they almost didn’t exist. Next time I might make them with rosemary or sage. Thanks, Clotilde!

Gougères au Cumin

• 6 Tbsp unsalted butter, diced
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup flour
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1 1/2 cups grated Gruyère cheese

Put butter, salt and water in a medium saucepan. Heat to a simmer, then remove from the heat and add the flour. Stir to blend, then put back over low heat and keep stirring until the dough pulls into a ball (this happened almost immediately for me). Take back off the heat.

Cool for 3 minutes, then add the eggs one at a time, making sure to incorporate each one into the batter (I made J. do this so my arm wouldn’t fall off). Add the cumin and pepper, then fold in the cheese. Cover the pan and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400°. Line a large baking sheet with parchment. Take the batter out of the fridge and drop spoonfuls onto the sheet as if you were making cookies. They can be spaced about an inch apart. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn off the oven and prop the oven door open slightly for 5 minutes. Take out the puffs and attempt to let them cool for a short while so you don’t scald the inside of your mouth.

Leftover batter can be baked up immediately (make sure to bring the oven back up to temperature) or the next day.