silan » Israeli Kitchen

Eggplant and Tahini Salad

Everyday Cooking, Vegetarian 10 Responses »

Apr 172009

This dish is called eggplant carpaccio in upscale restaurants. Plain folks call it eggplant and tahini salad. It would have been nice to make this dish for some Passover meal, but that sesame is, for some obscure reason, officially kitnyot. So I made it for Shabbat. I watched a Jerusalem chef make it and learned how to make this vegetarian folk dish that’s layered with Middle Eastern flavors.

Eggplant with Techina

serves 2-4 as an appetizer

Ingredients:

1 large or two medium eggplants

1/4 lemon to squeeze

cumin

salt & pepper

optional: 2 Tbslp. yogurt, beaten with fork till smooth

1 Tblsp. silan date syrup, or more if needed

2 Tblsp. techina per eggplant if medium-sized; 4 Tblsp. if large

Method:

Start by charring the eggplant. I’ve made this dish grilling the eggplant in the oven, but the charred taste is essential to the authentic taste. True, it’s a bit messy, but all good things emerge from a mess.

Use a tongs to turn the eggplant this way and that.

Make sure to char the eggplant all over, including the ends. Press a little with the tongs or a fork – when the whole vegetable yields softly, it is ready.

Remove the eggplants to a cool plate and get a small bowl of water ready. When the veg is just cool enough to handle by its cap end, wet your fingers and pick off the charred peel. (Couldn’t take a photo of myself doing that.)

Lay the eggplant down again and press a fork through the flesh, make striations along its length. This allows the vegetable to receive the flavorings, and looks pretty.

Squeeze some lemon juice over the surface.

Sprinkle cumin, salt and pepper over it.

Drizzle it up and down its length with techinah.

For a dairy meal, criss-cross the surface with a trail of yoghurt.

Last step, drizzle it with date syrup, or lacking that, honey diluted with water. You want only a little sweetness. Drizzle from side to side, or diagonally, so that it makes a pretty pattern.

Eat while its still warm, if possible. Delicious.

Passover Cooking: Sweet Potatoes Roasted in Date Syrup

Passover, What's Cooking for Shabbos and Yom Tov 3 Responses »

Mar 222009

For holiday meals I don’t have to think too much about side dishes. We all love vegetables. Sometimes, though, I want to serve something a little different, something more festive. One of my readers and commenters, Abbi, suggested drizzling sweet potatoes with Silan – date honey, before roasting. I liked the idea right away, and served the dish on Shabbat as a tester for Yom Tov.

If date honey is hard to find where you live, or too expensive an indulgence, maple syrup will do very well, or a few tablespoons of honey diluted with a little soup or plain water.

Here are two washed, sliced sweet potatoes, drizzled with Silan and olive oil, and besprinkled with salt, black pepper, cumin, and paprika. Let them sit in the spices for 15 minutes or so. That’s it, that’s the whole prep.

I made a nest for them out of tin foil, and put it in to roast next to some shnitzles I was doing in the oven. The scant juices (below) I poured out and mixed with pan juices from a roast chicken. The resulting gravy alone was worth the slight effort.

This served four. The Little One loved sweet potatoes made this way.

For the curious, here is what Wikipedia has to say about the date palm and its fruit. And honey-syrup.htm” target=”_blank”>here is a link from Iran about date honey – the site doesn’t mention Israel as a producer of dates, of course.

There’s nothing like a quick and easy side dish when you’re harried and up to your ears in holiday cooking. Thanks for the great idea, Abbi!

Roast Chicken with Figs

Fleish: Meat and Poultry, Just Hungry, What's Cooking for Shabbos and Yom Tov 6 Responses »

Sep 192008

Late summer is when fresh figs are at their peak. We eat them halved and drizzled with sweet cream for a luxurious breakfast – baked like apples, with a little honey spooned over them – poached in a light white wine syrup. Or just rinsed and eaten as they are. It’s not a cheap fruit, and spoils quickly, too. I try to estimate how much my family will eat, and buy only that much. But this week I did overbuy. They were small purple figs, with a curiously tough skin, although their hearts were red and sweet. What to do with them figs? I decided to roast them together with the Shabbat chicken.

Rosemary and figs taste good together, so I reached into the fridge and pulled out a jar of rosemary-infused olive oil. Then I felt that something was needed to boost the sweetness of the fruit, which otherwise might go unnoticed in all the chickeny things. I might have used honey, but that’s too sweet; or pomegranate molasses, but that’s not sweet enough. Silan, which is date syrup, was the right choice. Lemon seemed logical in this dish. Finally, I had a big handful of basil that needed to get used up. I was set.

Not in the photo is the bottle of Silan. Lacking that Middle Eastern ingredient, you might use two tablespoons of warmed, dark honey. And if rosemary oil isn’t something you normally keep in the fridge, it’s simple enough to make. Just pour about 1/4 cup of olive oil into a small pan; add 3 or 4 twigs of fresh or dried rosemary, and put the pan over the gentlest heat for about 20 minutes. Better is to put the pan inside a larger pan containing boiling water for an hour, and let the oil soak up the rosemary flavor that way – in any case, keep the pan covered while the oil is infusing. Cool and strain the oil before storing it in a jar. It will keep 3 months in the fridge.

Roast Chicken with Figs

Ingedients:

1 whole, clean, roasting chicken

1/2 lemon

2 large cloves of garlic, chopped fine

2 Tblsp. olive oil infused with rosemary

1 Tblsp. coarse salt

Black pepper 3 or 4 grinds of fresh or 1/8 tsp. powdered

1 small bunch of basil leaves, taken off the stems

14 small figs or 8 large ones, halved and their stems cut away

2 Tblsp. plain olive oil, if you don’t have rosemary-infused.

2 Tblsps. silan or warmed, dark honey

a dash of Tamari soy sauce

Method:

1. Squeeze the juice of the lemon over the chicken. Rub the lemon half all over the chicken. Tuck the spent lemon half into the cavity of the chicken. Cover the chicken and let it soak up the lemon while you’re preparing the next steps.

2. In a small bowl, combine 1 Tblsp. of the olive oil with the garlic, coarse salt, black pepper and soy sauce.

3. Rub the oily mix well over the chicken. Sweep up any garlic pieces that my fall onto the roasting pan and scoot them under the chicken.

4. Stuff the basil leaves under the skin of the chicken, anywhere you can find or force room. When in doubt, just put any extra leaves inside the cavity of the chicken alongside the lemon half.

4. Pile the figs up next to the chicken. Drizzle them with the remaining 1 Tblsp. rosemary oil and the silan. It won’t hurt if some of the garlicky mixture for the chicken gets mixed up with them.

5. Tear off a strip of tin foil and fold it so that it covers the figs, but not the chicken. Let the tin foil lie lightly over the figs; don’t tuck it in around them. You don’t want the figs to cook away to nothing while the chicken roasts – the tin foil will protect them.

6. Roast at 350F – 190 C till the chicken is an irresistible golden color and the house smells divine.

Serve with rice or couscous.