Greek Week Presents... Baba Ghanoush!

Whew! What an exhausting day at the Castle Farm! We made pitas, tzatziki, htipiti, hummus, and also baba ghanoush!  We don't necessarily recommend making all of these at the same time.  It's a lot of work for you and your food processor.

Anyway, we picked this baba ghanoush recipe from The Way the Cookie Crumbles because 1) it looked delicious and 2) she described an oven method of roasting the eggplants.  Though we ended up accidentally roasting them differently (we'll explain below).



ingredients
2 lbs eggplant
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 clove garlic
2 Tbsp tahini
salt and pepper to taste
1 Tbsp olive oil

instructions


1. Roast eggplants.  At TWTCC, there are some good instructions.  We'll show you what we did... basically, we got confused with the red pepper roasting method.  So, we chopped off the tops of the eggplants, cut them in half, and baked them at 500, skins up.

Luckily, we returned to flip them 15 minutes later to find some rather charred and stuck eggplants.  So, we pieced them back together (put the halves back on top), lowered the temperature to 450 and baked another 15 minutes.

When we came back, we flipped them (with some difficulty), and baked another 15 minutes.

Then, they were really done.

So we waited just a few minutes, and then stripped the skins and drained the juices.

Pros: faster cook time and don't have to try to chop a hot eggplant in half
cons: messier and mushier
overall: not sure it matters?

2. ok, the rest of the recipe is straightforward.  throw everything in the food processor.

Pulse a few times until coarse.  Adjust to taste (we added a little more salt and lemon juice).

3. Refrigerate 1/2 hour to let the flavors set in.

This was a really nice baba ghanoush.  Considering our near-disaster with the eggplant, the recipe must be pretty resilient.

That's it for recipes today! We'll be back tomorrow with some more courses for your Greek feast.

pig, out.