The weather was beautiful on Saturday, and I had been at work all day, so I was very happy to come home to a glass of rosé and dinner on the grill. Jon had picked up some gorgeous sweet corn from Dunbar Gardens, and there was a ribeye from an upriver Angus farm, as well as some eggplant left over from the last farmer’s market, which I decided to make into another batch of caponata.

Jon rubbed the corn with oil and a dry spice mix before grilling (see his recipe below). I love corn done this way, with just a little char and plenty of salt and hot pepper. He had run out of New Mexico chile powder, so he substituted a little extra cayenne and some dried chile flakes. The corn had quite a kick.

For the caponata, I tried something a little different. First, I used Castelvetrano olives, an unpitted green olive with a meaty texture and wonderful nutty flavor. We happened to have a few left, and I didn’t want to waste them, so I got out the Oxo cherry/olive pitter from my IFBC goodie bag. Astonishingly, it worked like a charm! A very handy little gadget.

 I chopped up the olives and tossed them with olive oil, red wine vinegar, capers, and chopped fresh tomatoes. The eggplant, which Jon dusted with more of his spice mix, was grilled and chopped up, then mixed with the other ingredients.

Finally, the secret ingredient: grilled garlic. I took a head of newly harvested garlic, cut the tips off the top of the cloves, then wrapped the whole thing in foil and set it on the grill. Once everything else was finished cooking, I unwrapped it and popped the garlic out of its skin into the caponata.

This turned out to be a really good idea. Some of the garlic dissolved into the caponata, and other cloves held their shape. It had that sweet caramelized flavor that well-roasted garlic has, without being in the least burnt. I tried fishing out a clove and smashing it onto the corn, which was also a good idea. With a bottle of Willis Hall Cabernet Franc, this dinner really made my weekend.

Southwest Spice Rub (for grilled corn or flank steak)

adapted from The Complete Meat Cookbook by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly

1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp chile powder
2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 1/2 tsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp cayenne

Mix all ingredients together. Toss corn into a bag or bowl with some canola oil, then add spice mix to taste and rub it in. Grill as desired.

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?

Somewhere along the line, North African cuisine has become one of my personal comfort foods. There’s something particularly wonderful about tagines with couscous, when it all blends together to create a bowlful of chewy, starchy, meaty deliciousness. The flavors are often pungent, but balanced, often with a good hit of fresh herbs, and I just find it so comforting on a cold evening. Last week I had a real craving for couscous with chicken and preserved lemon, and I must say it did the trick.

Of all the variations I’ve made of Moroccan chicken with preserved lemon and olives, this turned out to be a favorite. I found a recipe by Paula Wolfert that happened to use the sort of olives I had on hand and the right amount of lemon, and it was very successful. I particularly liked how it calls for braising bone-in chicken parts in aromatic broth, then taking out the pieces and roasting them until the skin crisps up and serving them with the reduced sauce. It prevents that soggy chicken skin problem that usually keeps me from braising skin-on pieces.

I didn’t marinate the chicken ahead of time (not my preference, just disorganized) and I left out the mashed chicken livers that the original recipe called for (partly because I didn’t have any, mostly because I don’t care for liver flavor). We served it with Israeli couscous. It was very rich with schmaltz, but sharp with lemon, olive and parsley. The last bottle of viognier from the basement was a perfect match.

Chicken with Lemon and Olives
adapted from Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco by Paula Wolfert

• 4 large chicken thighs (with skin and bone)
• 6 garlic cloves, pressed
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• coarse salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1 preserved lemon
• several spoonfuls of olive oil
• 1/4 tsp saffron, crushed
• half an onion, grated and squeezed dry
• handful of parsley or cilantro stems
• 1/2 cup kalamata olives

Scrape the pulp out of the lemon (reserving the rind) and combine it with the garlic, ginger, salt, pepper and some oil (puree it first, if you feel like washing the processor afterwards – I didn’t). Rub this all over the chicken and let it sit (She says overnight, I only had a few minutes). Cut the lemon rind into one-inch chunks.

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Put the chicken and its marinade into a casserole or dutch oven, along with the saffron, onion, parsley stems and 2 1/2 cups water. Bring to a boil, then partially cover and simmer for half an hour. Turn the chicken pieces frequently. Halfway through cooking, add the olives and the lemon rind.

Fish out the chicken pieces and put them in a roasting pan. Bake until beginning to brown and crisp up. Meanwhile, put the cooking liquid back on high heat and reduce it down to a sauce. Remove the parsley stems, then serve the chicken pieces with the sauce, making sure to include plenty of olives and lemon pieces. Serve with couscous or mashed potatoes, and a good sprinkling of fresh chopped parsley.

We had friends over to help celebrate the solstice, and after much deliberation we settled on North African-style food. I made a roasted chicken rubbed with pureed onion and sumac powder (from Claudia Roden’s Middle Eastern Food), chickpeas with pomegranate molasses, Lebanese couscous with apricots, and marinated olives. J made a green salad with strips of piquillo pepper and nuggets of fried garlic (from Casa Moro), and for dessert we just put out a big colander full of ripe strawberries and a bag of chocolate nib cookies from the Breadfarm. Oh, yum.

It was all fantastic, but I’d like to make special note of the olives. I had originally thought to make a Pernod-orange zest marinade like we had at Pair in Seattle, but then I opened my squeaky-new copy of Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and my eye lit on the first olive recipe: North African cumin and paprika marinated olives. Well, duh! I made those, of course. It was a little tricky finding green olives that weren’t already flavored and stuffed with something, but we found some, plus some kalamatas from our fridge that wanted using. The kalamatas worked better, since they were softer and absorbed more of the seasoning, but both were tasty. The flavors were summery and warming all at once – perfect for a cool June day.

Olives with Cumin and Paprika

from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

• 1 1/2 cups olives, green or black
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 2 tsp paprika
• a few pinches of hot red pepper flakes
• 2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• juice of one lemon

Drain the olives; if they’re very salty, you can rinse them as well. Toast the cumin seeds in a small pan until fragrant, then bruise them in a mortar. Add to the olives along with the rest of the ingredients, let sit for at least an hour. They get better the longer they marinate.