foodie fight!

because a barefoot challenge, baking club, bworld (explanation to follow later this week), and the epic sinus infection weren't enough, i decided to go to atlantic city this weekend and then come home and make my entry for foodie fights!

i've been rather busy and ignoring my blog email for awhile, and i decided to catch up on it while in the car on the way to atlantic city on friday night. lo and behold, i'd missed a notification from food fights that'd been chosen for the july battle of eggplant and white wine. OYE.

my karma is out of control; i bought 2 baby eggplants at the farmers' market last weekend and only used on one my pizza this week. so i didn't have to worry about the ingredients, but coming up with a recipe that i could make on sunday night after a weekend in AC was a bit daunting.

luckily, irma never lets me down. i tweaked the recipe for chilled eggplant from the joy of cooking and came up with a pretty solid version of babaghanoush in roughly 40 minutes. the recipe follows the photo, in paragraph form as per irma's style.

bring a pot of water to boil and cook until smushy, about 15 minutes:

one small eggplant, about 5-6 inches long

while the eggplant is cooking, saute in 2 tablespoons olive oil until brown and tender:

1/2 medium yellow onion

1 garlic clove, pressed

remove the eggplant from the boiling water and dice into 1/2 inch cubes.

once the onion is brown, add:

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

eggplant cubes

salt

pepper

deglaze the pan periodically with water and mush up the vegetables with a potato masher or a large wooden spoon. continue to cook.

after 15-20 minutes, deglaze the pan one final time with 3-4 tablespoons dry, white wine. stir in 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil, 1 tsp red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. cook for 5 minutes more, mushing up the vegetables until almost like a puree.

chill in the fridge overnight before serving.

if i had the time, i would have made pita bread to go with this. considering how freaking easy it was, a remake and some pita bread is totally probable.

stay tuned later this week for an explanation and mouth-watering photos from my adventure into my heritage with the zwetschgenkuchen i made for the cultural potluck at work =).

ciao,

J