Posts tagged as:

eggplants

Jedda’s Vegetable Moussaka

by Linda on April 30, 2010

I can’t say this is fast and easy.  It’s a long slow Sunday afternoon recipe, and it creates quite a bit of washing up!  But there’s a good return on investment – for an hour or so of Sunday afternoon baking, you can have several very healthy dinners and lunches made ready for the week.  And you won’t get sick of eating it.

There are three parts to this recipe:  the vegetables, the tomato sauce and the bechamel sauce.

The Vegetables:

Turn the oven on to warm up.

You can use a variety of vegetables in season. For this version I used an orange sweet potato,  half a pumpkin, two large eggplants, 400 grams of mushrooms, and a bunch of baby spinach, but feel free to substitute.

The eggplants are the slowest process, so start with them.  Slice into centimetre thick slices, sprinkle with salt, and put in a colander in the sink to drain.

Next the sweet potato.  It needs a bit of a head start cooking, so slice it into centimetre thick slices, massage with olive oil, spread out on a baking tray and bake to half cook, so the slices are just starting to get tender.

Slice the mushrooms and pumpkin into centimetre thick slices too.  Leave the spinach leaves whole.

By now the eggplants have drained enough.  Rinse and pat dry, massage in oil, and add to the sweet potato in the oven.

The Tomato Sauce

Saute a large onion, diced, in a little olive oil.  Add two or three cloves of garlic, chopped fine, and a diced capsicum, then half a dozen large tomatoes, diced (or a can of tomatoes) and a good handful of basil chopped.  Simmer gently to reduce to a fairly thick tomato sauce.

The Bechamel

In a saucepan, cook four good dessertspoons of plain wholemeal flour in 6 desertspoons of olive oil till it foams.  The idea is to explode the starch in the flour without browning it.  Add two cups of low fat milk and half a cup of low fat ricotta or cottage cheese and two bay leaves.  Cook, stirring, till it thickens. Fish out the bay leaves and add salt and pepper.

The Assembly

Oil a baking dish and place the partly-cooked sweet potato in a single layer in the bottom of it.  Cover with half the tomato sauce, then half the bechamel.  Spread a layer of pumpkin slices on top, then a layer of mushrooms and a layer of spinach leaves.  Cover with the other half of the tomato sauce, then the partly-cooked eggplant slices, then the other half of the bechamel sauce.  Sprinkle the top with grated parmesan.  Pop it back in the middle of a moderate oven and bake for about 25 minutes till the cheese is golden on top and the vegetables are tender.

It’s good hot or cold.

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Eggplant Pizza with Bunya Nut Pesto

by Linda on March 10, 2010

As seasonal a recipe as they come, this eggplant with pizza topping is easy and fast.

Slice  eggplant into 1.5 cm slices.  Salt and drain for an hour or so.  Rinse, pat dry, and rub with olive oil.

Bake for 20 mins or so till just starting to soften.

Cover with pesto, then pizza toppings of your choice: onion, capsicum, tomato, olives, mushroom – all finely sliced.

Top with a mixture of low fat cottage cheese and grated parmesan cheese in about a two to one ratio.

Pop it back into a hot oven for 10 minutes or so till the cheese mixture bubbles and browns. Good with a crunchy salad.

Bunya Pesto

I made the pesto for this batch with bunya nuts, and it was divine!  We have bunyas growing but the trees are young and don’t fruit every year. These ones came from some cones that some friends (thanks Ashley and Annie!) collected  from a roadside tree.  The big green cones fall apart as they ripen, releasing the nuts inside, that look like this:

I pressure cooked the bunyas for 20 minutes then cooled them, then cut them in halves and scooped out the nut.

There is a knack to doing this without cutting your fingers off.  Use a big heavy knife – the kind you’d use for a pumpkin.  Hold the nut with one hand, sitting it on its fat end, and get the blade of the knife dug in across the pointy end.  Shift your holding hand to the top of the knife and cut down.  Once you have the knack, it’s easy and fast.

Then it’s simply a matter of blending together basil and bunyas with olive oil, and adding just a little parmesan cheese, and garlic, and salt to taste.

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Lebanese Marinated Zucchini et al

by Linda on January 24, 2010

Obtain a yield is the permaculture principle, but zucchinis this time of year can be a challenge, not a yield, especially for the kind of frugal people that gardening attracts.

This recipe is not so much a way of preserving them as a way of making them a lot more popular (although it will last a long time in the fridge if someone doesn’t eat it first, which is highly unlikely because it is seriously delicious, for example on rye bread with cheese or in pitta bread with hummus, mmmm.)

You need about 4 cups of vegetables cut into 1 cm thick slices.  A mixture of  zucchini, eggplant and capsicum is wonderful and also looks gorgeous, but just zucchini on its own tastes good too.  For this batch I used green and gold zucchinis, black and red eggplants, red and green capsicums.

Put the zucchini et al in a colander, sprinkle with a good tablespoon of sea salt and let sit for two hours, stirring occasionally.

Don’t rinse, just transfer to a saucepan with 2 cups of water, 1 cup of cider vinegar, and about 4 cloves of garlic.  For all recipes that are acidic (like those with vinegar), it’s best to use a stainless steel, enamel, or Pyrex saucepan.  Bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes.  If you have fresh oregano and basil, add a dozen or so whole leaves of each in the last half a minute, just to blanch them.  Drain and arrange in clean glass jars.  If you didn’t have any fresh herbs on hand, sprinkle some dried herbs in as you fill the jars.

Cover with olive oil and keep in the fridge. To eat, fish the vegetables out with a fork.  You can re-use the oil for another batch or for salad dressing.

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