This isn't going to be my legit Recipe of the Month publish, because it doesn't truely qualify as both a soup or a salad. But it's miles, though, a dish that is (a) made nearly entirely of veggies, and (b) so scrumptious that I couldn't bypass up the threat to percentage it proper right here.
A little background: the H-Mart near our house often has good deals on Japanese eggplants (the long, thin variety). At first, we used these exclusively for making pasta a la melanzane, a very tasty pasta dish with eggplant, tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese. At some point, however, we decided that if we were going to keep buying eggplant on every trip to the H-Mart, we should try to expand our repertoire a bit. So we consulted our culinary bible, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and found a very simple method of cooking eggplant: cut it into slices, salt it if you like, brush the slices with a mixture of olive oil and minced garlic, and then grill or broil them until they're nice and brown. You have to pull out the tray once or twice to turn the slices, but they'll still cook through in ten minutes or less. And they are, we discovered, remarkably good this way—melt-in-your mouth tender, and rich with the absorbed flavor of garlic and salt. You don't have to do a thing more to them; they're delicious all by themselves, or served over a bowl of polenta for a a quick, simple meal.
We've been doing them this manner for a month or so now, but on our final adventure to the H-Mart, we came about to select out up some string beans in addition to the eggplants, and I observed myself recalling vaguely that someplace, sometime, I'd seen a recipe for eggplant and string beans cooked together, in garlic sauce. Maybe that might make a nice exchange of tempo. But we consulted all our cookbooks and could not find out any such recipe. Perhaps, I guessed it became simply some thing I'd seen on a Chinese menu someplace.
At that element, I turned into ready to give up at the idea, however Brian's imagination were caught with the aid of it. He said he turned into certain he should effortlessly concoct some thing along these traces, if we may also want to simplest discover a recipe for the garlic sauce. So I turned to Bittman all over again and determined a notably easy recipe for garlic-scallion sauce. You in reality cut up the scallions and garlic, combine them in a heatproof bowl with a piece of salt, then warm temperature the oil until it starts offevolved to smoke and pour it over top of the combination. The warm oil, it seems, mellows the taste of the garlic, drawing out most of its sting, with none danger of browning or burning it. And the oil selections up the flavors of the garlic and scallion, which it then distributes lavishly over the whole lot else it touches.
Armed with the ones techniques out of Bittman, Brian went to paintings. He roasted the eggplant in the regular manner, and he might have roasted the string beans as properly, but the pan wasn't massive sufficient, so he contented himself with saut?Ing them to easy-crispness in a huge skillet. Then he prepared the garlic sauce, denuding our indoor scallion flowers of most of their greenery to make up the favored quantity of inexperienced onion. Finally, he brought the grilled eggplant to the skillet with the beans, drizzled the garlic sauce over the entirety, stirred all of it together, and served it over some easy white rice.
The quit end result: an amazingly easy, mild meal that lacked now not whatever in taste and texture. It could have been even tastier if he'd been capable of roast the beans as he in the beginning meant; because it have become, the beans have been rather crunchier than the eggplant, and the contrasting textures had been a touch bit distracting. But it have become nevertheless correct sufficient for me to gobble down a whole bowlful and pass again for seconds, feeling no guilt approximately doing so because it changed into almost all vegetables. Admittedly, there has been moreover quite a piece of oil within the garlic sauce: the recipe known as for half of a cup of oil to half a cup of scallions, 1 / 4 cup of garlic, and a teaspoon of salt. But doling out the oil over this sort of big amount of vegetables regarded to take the curse off it, by some means. We supplied approximately a pound and a half of of of eggplant and half of of a pound of string beans on the H-Mart, and we used it all?Making enough to feed the 2 folks amply, with one generous issue left over for lunch. And the vegetables lost nothing in their flavor inside the leaving over; I devoured them down these days with truly as lots eagerness as I had last night time.
This is a meal that practically no person, I assume, have to have any objections to. It's completely vegan, gluten-unfastened, full of wholesome vegetables, and however certainly bursting with taste. The best possible sticking thing is probably the quantity of oil inside the sauce, however Brian thinks he have to probably reduce that back next time (and there absolutely may be a subsequent time) and it might pop out honestly as properly. And perhaps at the same time as we attempt it once more, we're going to control to rustle up a larger roasting tray, so we can cook dinner dinner the string beans and eggplant all together?Saving a step in the cooking system, as well as probably enhancing their taste even greater. I think we ought to without a doubt use a smaller quantity of vegetables, but then we might haven't any leftovers, and that might be a pity, would now not it?
