August and September are the Months of the tomato here where I live. It’s when the tomato-glut occurs when every seller at the Athens Farmer’s Market and every roadside stand and the Chesterhill Produce auction is pushing tomatoes of every type, size, color and flavor. They are everywhere.

It’s when I can tomatoes and make marinara sauce and salsa and can those and I eat tomatoes every day raw in salads, on sandwiches, just sliced up on a plate and just biting into them like apples. I eat them like this now because I never eat fresh tomatoes when they are not in season. So I have to gorge myself on them now while I can so I can get good and sick and tired of them so I won’t be momentarily tempted by the baseball-hard pink monstrosities in the grocery stores in the winter months.

But in addition to eating them raw, I cook with them as well.

For example–I got the idea for this tomato gratin from the folks at Integration Acres–they posted it on their Facebook page last Saturday morning and my eagle eye of course caught it on my newsfeed. It involved fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic and blue goat cheese all melted and delicious and I just had to taste it.

Their picture for it looked so darned good, I went right to the Farmer’s Market when it opened and bought the cheese, and got some tomatoes so I could run right home and make it.

(Can I say again how much I love both the fresh and ripened goat cheeses from the Integration Acres people? They really are great. I bet there’s a great cheesemaker near you–run right out and find them as soon as you can. Your taste buds will thank you later. And remember–”Blessed are the Cheesemakers…..”)

I hesitate to even dignify this by calling it a recipe, because it really is so simple. But that’s okay–it’s summer cooking at it’s finest–it’s simple, quick and absolutely allows the tomatoes, garlic, basil and cheese to shine like gustatory beacons.

It also fills the belly admirably for such a light dish.

Integration Acres Tomatoes Au Gratin
Ingredients:

Olive oil as needed
Fresh, meltingly ripe tomatoes–enough to fill a small casserole dish–two or three depending on the size you have
1 clove of very fresh garlic, peeled and minced
1 handful of fresh basil leaves, minced
2-4 ounces of your favorite blue cheese if you can get a ripened blue–all the better
salt and Aleppo pepper flakes or other hot pepper flakes to taste

Method:

Preheat your broiler and make certain that your rack is about three to four inches below the burner.

Lightly oil a small casserole dish with the olive oil.

Wash, core and cut the tomatoes in half. Then, thinly slice them into half-moon shapes. Toss them into the casserole.

Sprinkle the garlic and basil over the tomatoes and drizzle lightly with olive oil. Toss to distribute everything together nicely.

Top with crumbled or chunked bits of the blue cheese, then season with some salt and Aleppo pepper flakes, then drizzle a tiny amount of olive oil on top.

Pop it under the broiler and cook until the cheese is melted and everything is bubbly, happy and delicious with some browned bits on top.

Serve it over toasted bits of good bread. Or, just dig in with a spoon and gobble it right out of the dish. It’s great either way.

No, this isn’t traditional. At least, I don’t believe it is a traditional Indian dish. It’s possible that I hit upon a cooking method and ingredient list that is used in some of the South Indian states as a traditional dish by sheer luck, in which case, if there’s a real name for this, please, someone let me know.

Basically, I put this dish together to go with the Lamb Patties With Incendiary Green Chutney out of the vegetables from our garden and the other ingredients I had from the farmer’s market and laying about in the pantry.

This was meant to be a side dish, but if you wanted it to be the centerpiece of your dinner plate, you could add either tofu or paneer cheese and serve it with rice, spelt or wheat berry pilau or bread for a complete meal. You’d just pre-fry the tofu or cheese, then drain it on paper towels and then add it back to the pan at the same time you add the green beans so it has a chance to soak up the flavors from the pan without becoming overly brown.

I was inspired to make this because my curry plant is finally large enough to harvest bits and pieces, and I really wanted to use the musky-scented leaves in some sort of vegetable dish. I had green beans, a sweet bell pepper, garlic and carrots from our garden, as well as one purple onion from the market. Cumin seeds and mustard seeds go beautifully with curry leaves, so out of the cabinet they came.

Since the lamb patties are dry–though they are served with a green chutney and yogurt that acts as a sauce, I decided to add a little coconut milk to the pan to make a small amount of thick, clinging sauce which I colored with a scant bit of turmeric and smoked paprika. The paprika adds a subtle smoky flavor as well as color–I’ve found that it gives Indian food just a little bit more of a depth than plain paprika does.

Anyway, this is simple to make and tastes lovely. Zak, Kat and I gobbled it down gleefully–the vegetables retain their color and crunch, while still absorbing lots of the scents and savors of the spices. The coconut milk binds it all together and adds just enough moisture to keep the vegetables both crisp and juicy.

Well worth the time it took to think out and make, and is a good quick side dish or main dish to add to your repertoire.

South Indian Style Vegetable Saute
Ingredients:

1 tablespoon coconut oil or peanut oil
1 medium red onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon whole mustard seeds
10 curry leaves
1 small red bell pepper, seeded and cut julienne
3 carrots, peeled and cut julienne
8-12 ounces green beans, washed, topped and tailed and blanched then drained
1/2 cup coconut milk, divided
1/8 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/8 teaspoon smoked paprika (or regular paprika)
salt to taste

Method:

Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed skillet over medium high heat. Add the onion, sprinkle with salt and cook until the onion is turning golden. Add the garlic, cumin seeds and mustard seeds, then the curry leaves. Cook, stirring, until the garlic takes on a golden color and the onions are darker gold. Add the pepper and carrot, and cook, stirring, for several minutes, until the carrots start to become tender and take on color.

Add the green beans, and cook, stirring until the onions are well browned and the vegetables have nice brown spots in places. add half of the coconut milk, add the turmeric and paprika, and stir to combine. Cook down until the coconut milk virtually disappears and the vegetables are tender. Add the rest of the coconut milk, stir and cook for one more minute.

Add salt to taste and serve immediately.

Makes enough for three adults and one child.

But in the summer, when sweet corn is young, full of sugary plump kernels, bursting with flavor, we eat it like a vegetable.

And generally in the summer, we eat it on the cob.

Why?

Well, it’s more fun that way. Whether boiled, roasted, grilled or deep fried, corn on the cob is a hands-on, messy, joyful summer bundle of gustatory joy that I would never deny anyone. It’s just plain old wonderful.

But sometimes, (not very often) every now and then, you want something different.

And that’s when it’s time to cut corn from the cob and caramelize it.

Yep. Caramelize it.

Cook it in a nice hot saute pan until the sugars brown and the edges get a tiny bit crispy, while the inside of the kernel is chewy, yet still juicy.

Let me tell you, that’s some mighty fine eatin,’ as one of my uncles on the farm used to say. It isn’t as messy as corn on the cob to eat (though getting the kernels off the cob entails a wee bit of mess-making), but it is bursting with flavor.

This version I’m giving you here is vegetarian, made with vegetable broth, but I’ve also made a richer version with beef stock in it. I like them both–the vegetarian version is lighter with a more pure corn flavor–the beef broth gives a darker, deeper flavor, with the meatiness contrasting beautifully with the browned sugars of the corn.

I meant this to be done as a side dish, but you know, if you have some cooked and drained black beans, you could add those, and maybe even a sprinkling of shredded extra sharp or smoked cheddar cheese to make a light but still satisfying vegan or vegetarian main dish. I reckon that if you had some rendered bacon fat sitting in your fridge or you wanted to add some chopped cooked bacon to the dish you could, though it would ruin the corn for your vegetarian and Muslim friends, so don’t do that. Certainly not this close to Ramadan, right?

Suffice to say, this is a versatile enough recipe you could make all sorts of variations to your own taste. The only necessary ingredients are the butter or olive oil, the onions and garlic, salt, pepper, corn and broth. After that, the additional ingredients are up to the contents of your refrigerator, panty, spice cabinet and your imagination.

Let me know what you come up with when you make this–I’d love to hear what goodies you add to this very simple corn recipe.

Oh, and one more thing–use the freshest sweet corn possible. The sugars in corn convert to starch as soon as the ear is torn from the stalk. The more sugar that’s in your corn, the more caramelization you can achieve when you cook it and the better it will taste. If you use starchy corn that’s a week old or more, you’ll have to -add- sugar to it to make it come close to tasting as good as it should. So, avoid that by just using corn that is no more than three days old, if possible.

Caramelized Sweet Corn
Ingredients:

1/2 dozen ears corn, shucked and de-silked
2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled, cut in half and then sliced very thinly
1/4 teaspoon salt
1-2 cloves garlic minced
freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/2-3/4 cup vegetable broth
roughly chopped fresh cilantro, parsley or basil for garnish

Method:

Cut the corn from the cob. This is somewhat tricky and a bit messy, and you’ll likely miss a few kernels here and there, but you can do it. My Grandma always did it this way, even when she was freezing corn for the winter, when we processed corn by the bushel, and she never cut herself or anything else except the corn. Eventually, Grandpa did make her a more efficient corn cutter, but that was after I was seven years old or so and she’d been cutting it with a knife before that for something like thirty years.

Basically, you hold the corn on a cutting board or inside a wide, shallow bowl, vertical, with the pointy end in one hand, and the flat end where it attached to the stalk held firmly against the board or bowl. I tend to use a bowl–it keeps the kernels from scattering hither and yon all over the cutting board and countertop and on my chest, when I’m cutting it. But Grandma always just used her cutting board.

Using a sharp knife of any sort you like–I use a chef’s knife, Grandma used a butcher knife and my mother used a paring knife–the shape and type matters less than it’s sturdiness and sharpness–carefully start at the top of the cob, and with a slight sawing motion, cut down the entire cob. This should separate the kernels from the cob. Don’t cut too deeply–you’ll get cob bits–but don’t cut too shallowly–then you leave lots of kernel on the cob. Practice will help you get it right–and you’ll find that depending on the width of your knife blade, you can cut up to three or four rows of kernels off at a time.

Continue around the corn until as many kernels as possible have been separated from the cob.

When you are done, wash your hands and knife well–they’ll be sticky with corn juice.

In a medium sized heavy bottomed saute pan, heat the butter or oil on medium heat until the butter melts and foams or the oil ripples and shimmers. Add the sliced onion and sprinkle well with the salt. Cook, stirring, until the onion is medium golden colored. Add the garlic and cook for one more minute, until the garlic is fragrant and beginning to turn golden at the edges.

Add the corn kernels all at once and turn the heat down to medium low and cook, stirring, until the onions turn deep golden brown and the corn has started browning well around the edges. Add black pepper to taste and keep cooking and stirring, until the corn is showing a great deal of golden brown color and everything smells browned and delicious. (There should also be brown bits of sugar and starch clinging to the bottom and sides of the pan at this time.)

Deglaze the pan with the broth, cooking and stirring, scraping every bit of the browned goodness from the bottom of the pan. Cook, stirring, until almost all of the broth is evaporated, and the corn is shiny and uniformly golden brown.

Garnish with roughly chopped herbs, and serve immediately. Feeds about three or four adults as a good side dish.

(I had to go with the alliteration, alright?)

Anyway, now that I’ve thoroughly confused everyone, let’s talk about the meatless dinner I threw together out of my fridge and pantry with no advanced preparation. I was caught out not knowing what we were going to eat at five in the evening, because I’d had so much fun working in the garden I forgot to think up an idea about dinner. These things happen to everyone, so I’ll let you know just how fast one can prepare vegetarian quesadillas with a homemade salsa in a bit more than an hour.

Even with the help of a five year old, I must add.

First, I had to dig around in the fridge and see what was there. Two leftover ears of grilled corn, still on the cob (so there’s one bit of advanced preparation), a block of local sharp cheddar cheese, some multi-grain tortillas, a pale green summer squash, a big bowlful of heirloom tomatoes, the first jalapenos and Thai chilies from our garden, local purple onions, cilantro, and some limes I got to make the Thai Basil Chicken we enjoyed last night. Oh, and the Greek yogurt I made yesterday.

All of these were pulled out of the fridge at top speed and handed off to Kat who shuttled them from Mom’s hand to the counter with all the speed and dexterity that every first grader has, which means one of the tomatoes got a bit bruised and a lime was stepped on, but that’s okay, that just broke the juice sacs so we could get more out of it. Right?

So, quesadillas came right to mind, but looking at the corn and the squash, I thought to myself that we needed some beans. Because if you have two of the traditional three sisters, you’d best invite the third one or something bad will happen along the lines of the fairy who wasn’t invited to that princesses’ christening and she laid a nasty curse on her. (Let’s just mix mythologies into a cocktail of confusion, shall we?)

But my containers of pre-cooked beans perished in the slowly thawing freezer during our long power outage, and I had no canned beans, because I’d been pre-cooking and freezing them for so long, so what to do?

Pull out the pressure cooker and make super quick smoky vegetarian black beans. Nothing to it. Once the pressure cooker is up to pressure, the beans took twenty-five minutes to cook and bam! There they were, ready to be drained and added to the quesadillas.

While the beans cooked, Kat and I made Calico Salsa, which she now insists we call Calico Kat Salsa, since she helped cut the tomatoes, pick the cilantro leaves, squeeze the limes and peel the garlic. So, please note the name change, and keep in mind this is the earliest I’ve made it ever, because the tomatoes are all coming in a month earlier than usual. I planted mine out in late March because out winter was so warm. I only had to cover them twice. So, yeah. Weird climate change stuff.

Anyway, on to happier thoughts.

Like sauteing squash.

It’s simple–I cut it up into thick julienne pieces (with Kat’s help, I might add), and heated some olive oil in a pan and sprinkled salt on the squash and tossed it around, seasoning it with Aleppo pepper flakes and a sprinkle of garlic halfway through cooking, then tossed it around some more. I let it get nice and toasty brown in spots, caramelizing the sugars nicely, then dumped it in a bowl to cool off.

Then, I shredded the cheese and Kat picked cilantro leaves from the stems and in a flash, we were good to go.

All that was left to do was assemble the quesadillas, fry them lightly in olive oil, cut them up and pass the salsa and yogurt as toppings, and there was dinner. Took Kat and I about an hour and fifteen minutes. (I would have been faster working alone, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.)

Now, this all said, you can do this even faster if you cook beans ahead of time and keep them in your fridge or freezer, have salsa made ahead or get it from a jar, and keep pre-shredded cheese around your house. Whatever shortcuts you like, do them! Just try and start out from fresh ingredients and you can’t go wrong with this simple, flavorful vegetarian dinner.

These taste great–the earthy richness of the beans, the sweet corn and soft, and the mellow squash are tied together with the tangy cheese and yogurt and the sparkle of the salsa. Well worth the trouble of making, whether are you meditating in the kitchen alone or are helped by little ones and friends.

Three Sisters Quesadilla
Ingredients:

1 pound dried black beans, rinsed and picked over then drained
1 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary leaves
4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 zucchini or other summer squash, cut into thick julienne slices
salt
pinch of Aleppo Pepper flakes
2 ears of grilled corn, kernels cut from the cob
cilantro leaves to taste
whole grain mixed grain flour tortillas
8 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
olive oil as needed for pan frying
Greek yogurt or sour cream for serving1 recipe of Calico (Kat) Salsa

Method:

To cook the beans in a pressure cooker, after picking over them and washing and draining them, add them to the pressure cooker, along with smoked paprika, bay leaf, cumin and fresh rosemary leaves. Add one tablespoon of the oil and then add water to cover the beans by two inches.

Lock on the lid, turn the pressure valve to high, and put over high heat and bring to a boil so that the lid lock button pops up indicating full pressure. Turn the heat down to low and cook for twenty five minutes. Remove from heat, release pressure using the quick release method and when the pressure is released, unlock the lid and open the cooker. Drain out two cups of the beans, saving the rest of the beans and bean broth, if you wish, for another purpose. (I stuck mine in the freezer.) You may season the drained beans as you like–I added extra cumin, some salt and some more smoked paprika, and stirred them up well.

Add three tablespoons of olive oil to saute pan and heat on high. Add the squash pieces and sprinkle with the salt, then cook, stirring and tossing until the pieces go limp and start to turn golden. Sprinkle with the pepper flakes and keep cooking until the squash has released most of its water and has caramelized with some edges becoming crispy and brown. Set the squash aside in a bowl to cool.

To assemble the quesadillas, lay out one tortilla, and sprinkle with enough cheese to lightly cover the surface, excluding a 3/4 inch border around the edges of the tortilla. Add beans, corn, and squash to taste along with cilantro leaves, then sprinkle a small amount of cheese over the vegetables.

Top with another tortilla, and press the layers together gently but firmly with your hands. Heat in a microwave briefly–for about 12 seconds to melt the cheese slightly, then press the tortillas together so they are kind of “glued” into a single quesadilla unit.

Assemble all quesadillas before cooking.

Heat enough olive oil to cover the bottom of a frying pan that will fit the tortillas. Test the heat of the oil with a bamboo chopstick or wooden utensil. When fine bubbles form around the edges of the chopstick or implement, the oil is hot enough. Carefully slide a quesadilla into the pan and cook until the edges turn brown–about 1 minute, then carefully, with two spatulas, one on the bottom and one on the top, flip the quesadilla and cook until the underside is golden brown and the edges are crispy, about another minute.

Drain on paper towels and cut into wedges. Serve with salsa and yogurt or sour cream.

In my last post, I described my general love of all things eggplant and gave a recipe for a Chinese way of cooking them.

In my litany of international ways with eggplant with which I am not only familiar but also adore, I left out one very important subcontinent: India.

That’s because I wanted to write a post specifically about Indian ways with eggplant, also known as brinjal.

In India, eggplant can be stuffed and baked, stuffed and simmered, fried, roasted and mashed, and, of course, cooked into a myriad of curries, from the dry to the saucy, with sauces based on tomatoes, onions, coconut milk, ground up nuts or yogurt.

I believe the creative culinarians of India have simply come up with more ways to cook eggplant than just about anyone else in the world. Well, maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration–but I don’t much care, because the simple truth is this–every Indian eggplant recipe I’ve tried, I’ve adored. There isn’t a single one I’ve tried that I’ve not liked. Not one. In my experience, each one is tastier than the last, or at least as tasty as the last and they are all just SO amazing.

It’s because eggplant is a flavor sponge that Indian spices just make them taste so amazing. What is really amazing is how well the eggplants soak up the spices without losing their own sweet or lightly bitter flavor. And, as always, eggplant has that rich, silky texture that makes it especially filling and satisfying without being heavy.

This particular recipe is a traditional Hyderabadi way of cooking tiny baby eggplants–like the ones I picked from the plants on my deck.

I tasted this dish just this week, on Tuesday, at Reethika’s lunch buffet. Cute whole baby eggplants were split into quarters without being cut completely apart and simmered in a rich, warm brown curry sauce redolent with spices in the foreground, and deep in the background was an addictive nutty sweetness redolent of well, it tasted sort of like peanuts, but not exactly. I thought it might have been peanuts mixed with toasted round urad dal or perhaps chana dalia, but I couldn’t be sure.

When I got home and started researching the recipe, I discovered that I was right about the peanuts, but the other nut flavor I caught was toasted sesame seeds. AHA! That’s why it didn’t taste exactly peanut like–but had another nut flavor mixed in as well. The other main flavoring was ground toasted unsweetened coconut.

Knowing I had plenty of baby eggplants to be used this weekend, I decided to try my hand at this delicious, unique curry. Of course, by the time I started cooking dinner on Saturday, I realized that some very important ingredients I usually had in my pantry were missing. But, more on that later.

When I picked my baby eggplants–some of them turned out to be too big to be really counted as babies. So, instead of just slitting the eggplants into quarters, I actually cut them into chunks. These I browned in peanut oil until they were just starting to soften and were maybe about half-cooked through. I set the eggplant aside, and browned a red onion cut into a medium dice in the same pan.

Back to those important ingredients that turned up missing.

I almost always have dry roasted unsalted peanuts in my pantry, as well as white sesame seeds and unsweetened shredded coconut.

However, once I picked my eggplants and had a severe craving for this peanut-sesame sauce, I discovered that Zak had eaten the peanuts, the sesame seeds had been borrowed by Morganna and the coconut had fallen into a hole in the space-time continuum and had ended up in another universe entirely.

Normal people would just make a different eggplant curry, but not I. My tastebuds were set for the peanut sauce and the peanut sauce I would have. I thought of going out the Asian market to pick up the peanuts, sesame seeds and coconut, but by the time I was cooking, the store was already closed.

So, I set to thinking.

While I lacked peanuts, I did have natural peanut butter, which is nothing more than peanuts ground up with a little bit of extra peanut oil and a touch of salt. And though my pantry was sans sesame seeds, I did have a jar of tahini, which is nothing more than ground up toasted sesame seeds. And though there was no coconut, I did have some coconut milk, which while it isn’t made from ground up coconut directly–it is made of ground coconut steeped in hot water until the flavor and fat is extracted.

I made the command decision to use these substitutions, to see if I could make a credible alternative to the traditional recipe.

I have to say that while I felt guilty for bastardizing the recipe, and I fully intend to make a more traditional version of it the next time I get my hands on baby eggplant, eating the dish cooked this way was fully as satisfying as eating it made the proper way. The only difference I could detect was that my version was a little smoother, and the sauce was a bit more rich, I think from using the coconut milk instead of ground coconut.

Other than that, even with the substitutions, mine was a credible version of a classic dish that is going to become a regular way to cook eggplant in my kitchen, and is worth knowing, especially for folks who don’t own a grinder that is up to the task of grinding peanuts, sesame seeds and coconut into a smooth paste.

Hyderabadi Bagara Baigan
Ingredients:

2 tablespoons peanut oil (cold pressed, unrefined tastes amazing here)
1 pound very small (golf ball sized) baby eggplant
1 medium red onion, diced medium (about 3/4 cup diced)
1 1/2″ cube ginger, peeled and minced very finely (or pureed)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced very finely (or pureed)
1 1/2 tablespoons natural peanut butter
1 tablespoon tahini
2 tablespoons coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander seeds
1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
ground cayenne chili to taste
1 1/2 teaspoons tamarind concentrate
1 1/2 cups water (or more as needed)
salt to taste
roughly chopped cilantro as garnish

Method:

Cut the stem off of the baby eggplants carefully, peeling it away and leaving the fruits mostly whole. Cut an “X” from the rounded end (opposite the stem end) almost, but not quite through the fruit, nearly cutting it into quarters. (If your eggplants are bigger than golf ball sized, go ahead and cut them into quarters)

Heat the peanut oil in a shallow, heavy bottomed pan over high heat and cook the eggplants until they are soft, but still somewhat firm in the middle–not quite completely tender. Remove eggplant and set aside.

In the same pan, using the same oil, brown the onion, stirring, until it is a deep mahogany color. Add the ginger and garlic, then the peanut butter, tahini and coconut milk, and turn the heat down to medium and cook, stirring, until fragrant–about two minutes. Add the spices, and cook one more minute. Add the tamarind concentrate and water, and stir well to combine.

Simmer until the eggplants are fully tender and the sauce has thickened, adding water as needed to cook the eggplants all the way.

Add salt to taste, and sprinkle with cilantro as garnish.

This is great with chapati or rice, either one. It’s even better with both.