Cardamom Cilantro Fairytale Eggplants. F is for Fairytale.

I am aware that I may isolate many sane readers who will question the practicality of buying many miniature eggplants.  Especially as they are preciously named after a childhood ideal that conjures up strong, white steeds and ladies with impossible hair.  Furthermore, I suspect at first pass my addition of vanilla is not going to win over very many hearts.

Bear with me.  My thirty-one years have left me nothing if not at least a little wiser.  And also comfortably aware that most of the bow-tied stories we sell are hooey. Unless, of course, your fantasy includes a woman alone in the kitchen with an eggplant à la Laurie Colwin-style.  Then you’ve got a real shot, friend. (Unless, of course, you have children.  Then your chances are probably back to make-believe.)

The fairytale eggplant is a facsimile of your standard aubergine, except it’s shrunken to an eighth its size and is often found violet-hued, antiqued with white streaks.  When cooked, they collapse and shrivel slightly away from their skin, poetically turning brown along the way.

I find them much simpler to manage than the football-shaped grocery store Italian variety. Which makes them fast charmers.  They are a low grill risk for becoming charred beyond pleasurable consumption and simultaneously tough.  They are not bitter. Their skins are thin and edible and their flesh, soft.

Thus, no salting, no skinning, and minimal swearing in the kitchen.  So I prefer them, despite their name.  And there may come a time when you find yourself face to face with some.  You’ll want to be ready. 

I have a fairly standard vegetable treatment, which includes olive oil, more salt than recommended by the American Heart Association, fresh lime, and cilantro.  If you have cardamom and cumin, it's wise to employ them.  And—I swear—adding a little vanilla adds intensity and softness, especially paired with the smokiness of the grill. 

Since I am without open flames this summer, I can assure roasting will do in a pinch.  What should result is small, slumped, deeply flavored eggplants.  They are good hot out of the pan. They are wonderful eaten all by their lonesome.  Or on toast.  And probably sing tossed into a cold pasta salad.  When chilled they act as a marinated vegetable and behave wonderfully this way.

So you make the marinade.  You toss the fairytales.  You roast.  You eat.  And you all live happily ever after. At least until it's time to do the dishes.

Cardamom Cilantro Fairytale Eggplants

Ingredients:

10 fairytale eggplants, sliced lengthwise

juice of ½ a lime

5 or 6 cardamom pods, shells smashed and discarded and seeds ground

pinch cumin seed, ground

4 to 6 tbsp olive oil (start with less and add more as needed)

kosher salt, to taste

3 to 4 tbsp finely chopped cilantro

½ tsp vanilla extract 

splash of orange blossom or rosewater

Instructions:

Set the oven to 425 degrees.  In a small bowl, combine the lime juice, spices, olive oil, and pinch of salt.  Add in the cilantro and remaining extracts.  Taste and adjust the seasoning as you see fit.

On a sheet pan, toss the eggplant halves well in the marinade until fully covered and glossy. (You’ll need enough oil so they can slide around to help prevent sticking to the pan.)  Sprinkle a bit more salt over them.

Roast for about 30 minutes, until they are tender, have turned brown, and are starting to slightly shrivel.

Serve warm or chilled.

Makes enough for about 4 as a side

Notes:

-I usually leave the stems on, but wouldn’t recommend eating them.  Quite woody.

-If you don’t have whole cardamom you can use ground; start with a pinch.  I use a mortar and pestle to do the smashing and grinding for both the cardamom and cumin seed.

By Chance, Spiced Banana Bread with Cinnamon Crumble Topping

This banana bread happened by chance.  I was hungry for comfort.  I had gone to the market to make roast chicken and ended up with a bunch of bananas in my bag that did not belong to me.  I believe in things like that.  I took it to mean that I desperately needed banana-related baked goods in my immediate future.

As a general rule, I’m not good at anticipating banana bread.  You have to buy bananas and then get comfortable with them sitting quietly, turning into what look like intensely spotted yellow and brown giraffe necks.  I just can’t get relaxed about that sort of thing.  But I can get relaxed about eating banana bread.  So I let them ripen.  And then got to work.

This bread has since been slathered with warm memories.  I made it for a trip I took with some friends to the Adirondack Mountains.  On Saturday morning, we stood around the camp kitchen island and sliced off bits while we chatted and the coffee pot worked overtime.  As we reduced the bread to a mere nub, my mother flipped enough pumpkin pancakes to feed a forest of lumberjacks.  

We laughed a lot that weekend.  We tasted wine from a local winery called Montezuma, tried on fur hats, talked about hot cinnamon-sugared donuts, and visited quite possibly the most quintessential general store on the East Coast.

We also enjoyed our fair share of banana bread.  And so I’ve begun think of this recipe as living in the company of warm friends and brisk mornings.  It’s spiced with cardamom, ginger, and allspice and the crunchy cinnamon sugar crust just begs to be paired with a good cup of coffee and a companion or two.  It’s a fairly new recipe to me, but it already feels seasoned. It’s just that kind of bread.  The kind that makes you thankful for good friends and overripe bananas. 

Spiced Banana Bread with Cinnamon Crumble Topping

Adapted from Molly Wizenberg from Orangette

Ingredients:

The bread

1.5 cups all purpose flour

1 cup sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp ground cardamom (freshly ground if possible)

1/2 tsp ground allspice

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp kosher salt

1 cup mashed bananas (about 3 bananas)

2 large eggs

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup honey

1/4 cup water

(Plus butter and additional flour for the loaf pan)

The topping

2 tbsp sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

2.5 tbsp packed dark brown sugar

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Butter and flour a 9 x 5 loaf pan.  In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, spices, baking soda, and salt.  In a large bowl, combine the banana, eggs, oil, honey, and water.  Add the flour mixture to the banana mixture and stir until combined.  Pour the batter into the buttered and floured loaf pan.

In a small bowl, mix the topping ingredients; sprinkle the topping on top of the batter.  Bake for about an hour or until a toothpick or cake tester comes about clean.  Cool the bread in its pan on a wire rack for 30 minutes and then remove the bread from the pan.  (Run a knife along the edges of the pan to loosen it; it may take some gentle coaxing and slight side tilting to remove the loaf, but you should be able to do it without losing much of the crumb topping.)  

Yield: 1 loaf

Notes:

-The cardamom really comes through in this loaf.  It's a nice change of pace from a standard banana bread and goes well with the crunchy cinnamon topping, but feel free to leave it off if you aren't keen on the spice.

-You may be inclined to forgo the topping, but it really makes the bread and moves it one step closer to coffee cake.  And this is a very, very good thing.

-This is a version of a version.  Molly Wizenberg attributes this recipe to Bakesale Betty and Bon Appétit.

Here's Looking at You, Pistachio Butter

There is something truly special about riding in trains. As I write this, I am currently en route via train, homeward bound for upstate New York, for a wedding. As a romantic, I find travel by train both exotic and old fashioned. And I suppose this is true for most of the luxuries I hold dear to my heart.

Take my love for the movie, Casablanca; it doesn’t get any better than watching Bogart in black and white, bitter in Morocco and trying his damnedest to erase the memory of lost love. I also enjoy wedding cake as a luxury; its very nature makes it so. It’s nearly as rare as love and is often just as fleeting. I’ve been burned by missing the cake at a wedding reception on more than one occasion. It’s a terrible feeling: like my insides have been kicked out, as one notable movie character once said about getting stood up at a train station, in the rain.

And so on my 10 hour train ride home, I have time to think about things like lost love and wedding cake. Not that I mind, I get this time completely to myself. Bogart and cake aside, time may be the ultimate luxury. It certainly seems both exotic and old fashioned these days.

What is decidedly NOT a luxury—nor do I hold it dear to my heart—is the food on trains. Gone are the dining cars filled with bone china and dessert spoons. Train meals today involve sad, shrink-rapped turkey sandwiches and bags of Doritos and so I always pack my lunch. My train lunches usually involve some sort of take on the classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This winter, it was cashew butter and orange marmalade. Going home in the spring involved an amalgam of almond butter and raspberry rhubarb jam. (I am as much of a sucker for sandwiches as I am for cynical movie characters.)

This morning, however, my sandwich supplies were dangerously low. I admit I have not had time on my side lately, especially not for seasonal fruit spread making. I had to think fast. Watching senor Rick battle his inner demons while eating a humdrum peanut butter sandwich on the train simply would not do. I spied some lonely pistachios and a few apricots from the farmers’ market in the fridge and got to work.

With the help of a kitchen aid, I soon had the pistachios blended to a paste and flavored with exotic spices. I spread the spiced pistachios on homemade bread flecked with anise seeds and topped them with sliced apricots.

So there you have it. Wedding cake, spiced pistachio sandwiches on trains, and Bogart: these are a few of my favorite things. One part classic, one part extraordinary. Wedding cake may be fleeting, but pistachio butter and Bogart are forever.

Cardamom Pistachio Butter

1/2 cup shelled pistachios

1/4 cup (or just shy of 1/4 cup) sugar

1 1/2 tbsp almond oil

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp cinnamon (I used Vietnamese cinnamon)

4 cardamom pods, pods smashed and seeds ground with a mortar and pestle and pods discarded

Pinch allspice

Pinch salt

Blend all ingredients in a food processor. Thin out with additional water to get desired consistency. (I used about 2 tbsp.)

Makes 3/4 cup.

Notes:

I froze the rest of the pistachio spread. I imagine it will be lovely on toast or a warm croissant. I may even try filling dates with it, though it might need a hint of something acidic to balance out the sweetness of the dates. If you wrapped the stuffed dates with prosciutto it probably wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.

You could also just use ground cardamom if you don’t want to fuss with the pods, though I personally find the pod smashing therapeutic.