Stuffed Eggplant Middle Eastern Style and Avacodo Cucumber Salad

We volunteered to help our son and daughter-in-law for a month or so. She is finishing up her PhD and we thought we’d better help with the family so she could finish up.

My job has been to cook for 7-10 people every day, plus laundry and taking care of 2 littles, 2-1/2 and under 1. And since I’m gluten free, the meals are gluten free.

Our son, Nate sells his almonds at farmers markets so brings home boxes of fruits and veges that he trades for. My challenge is to use as many of the fruits and veges as possible. So far I’m winning the challenge!!!!

Nate brought a box of eggplants from the market and I was thinking about what I could make with so many. Then I remembered a dish that we’d had in 1981 in Jerusalem.

In 1981 we were in Jerusalem visiting Dale’s brother and sister-in-law, who were working and living in the city. They were working with the Palestinian people so we were introduced to their workers and their families.

Jan, my sister-in-law, made arrangements for the 2 of us to have a cooking lesson from one of the women. One of the dishes that the woman had us make was a stuffed eggplant dish. It used lamb, cut into very small pieces, and I remember the eggplants and squash being stacked in a large pot. There was lots of liquid added and a plate was on top to hold the eggplants and squash down.

As I’m not at home I don’t have the recipe with me, but fortunately with Google, it is easy to find something similar. Here is my revised stuffed eggplant dish. It was a huge hit.

1 lb ground turkey

1 C rice

Water for the rice

½ large onion

4 or 5 cloves garlic chopped fine

½ tsp Allspice

½ tsp Cinnamon

1 lg can stewed, peeled and chopped tomatoes.

In a saucepan, sauté the onion and garlic, then add the rice and sauté briefly. Add water to the rice and cook until it is done.

When cool, add the rice to the turkey along with the spices. Add a little salt and some fresh ground pepper.

Cut the tops off of the eggplants then cut lengthwise in half. Make a trench about ¼” from the edge all the way around, the cut across the bottom. Don’t cut thru the peel. Remove the cut part. You can cut across the bottom in a small area then lift most out.

Put the meaty part of the eggplant in a bowl and save to work with later.

As you trench the eggplants place in skillets. When all of the eggplants have a trench then fill the trench with the meat and rice combo.

Divide the stewed tomatoes between the skillets and put the tomatoes on top of as many eggplants as possible. Add water to reach the top of the eggplant. Bring to a simmer then cover and simmer for about 1 hour.

When the eggplants are cooking, take your centers and put in a skillet along with about ¼ C Olive Oil and 4 TB butter. You can add more butter if you need it. Sauté until the eggplants are soft and mushy. Serve as a side dish.

For the salad: I had a bunch of cucumbers and avocados so was happy when I found an idea for a cucumber-avocado salad.

Cucumbers diced

A couple of Avocados diced

Juice of 1 lime

Salt and pepper.

This is a great simple salad

A Near Disaster Meat Course

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that these dinners are easy and without any hassles whatsoever. Quite the opposite, they are lots of effort and many things go terribly wrong. It is just that by the time the dinner is on no one knows about the disaster.

For the Downton dinner we planned, and did serve, Boeuf Bourguignon based on Julia Child, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” Vol 1.

I will give you the recipe as I made it and then tell the story of what really happened.

Boeuf Bourguignon

3-4 slices of pre-cooked bacon, cooked thru

3# lean stewing beef cut into 1” cubes, or smaller

Olive Oil

2 sliced carrots

1 sliced onion

Salt and pepper

4 C wine, we used French Bordeaux  then threw in some Navarro Pinot later.

2 C beef stock

1 TB tomato paste

4 cloves garlic chopped fine

½ tsp Thyme

1# sliced mushrooms.

Cook bacon in a stew pot. Add some olive oil.

Put beef into pot in small portions and brown on all sides.  Remove beef cubes when browned. Add carrots, onions and at the last minute Thyme, to the pot and brown. Add beef back, then wine, stock, tomato paste and chopped garlic.

Heat oven to 325.

Put the pot into the oven and bake for 3-4 hours.

Now here is where the real story begins:

So I get the pot out of the oven and open it, YIKES!!! Beef pieces on the top were way too dry and too chewy. The pot was black inside but fortunately the food wasn’t burned.

I was beside myself. We had gone to a really great meat market and bought the best there. It was cut up to our exact dimensions. I sat the pot on the stove to cool and left it alone over night.

On Sunday I really didn’t have a new plan for the meat course, and while this dish was fairly tasty there wasn’t anything special about it. I knew that it needed something more. I’d opened a bottle of really great Pinot the night before so I poured in enough to cover the meat then put the fire on under the pot. This was on the stove top. I cooked it on low and hoped for the best.

By the time we were ready for the meat it was a rich, flavorful, soft dish. Lucked out this time!

The Downton Dinner

At 6pm our guests starting arriving. Since this was a theme party everyone was in some sort of Downton Abbey dress. Dale played the part of Mr. Carson and I was Mrs. Hughes. Our friends Ross and Janice had pre-arranged with us to be Lord and Lady Grantham. Tom just came in from hunting so was in his hunting garb complete with a chicken (rubber that squeaked when touched). Lots of laughs from that one!

Dale announced that dinner was served. Our friend Dolly was the guest of honor and walked into the dining room on Ross’ arm. Everyone was seated appropriately, husbands and wives separated and in their proper place according to rank.

We sat down just a few minutes late for our soup course which did make everything run a little late. It was about 8:45 when we really needed to get our dessert course on as Downton started at 9pm. We would have to give up the cheese course.

We encouraged 2 of our friends to stop talking and eat quickly so we could have our desert. We put Downton on Pause for the few minutes we took to finish our dessert.

We were all so stuffed that skipping the cheese course was not all bad. All in all it was a good party.

Everything Ready for a Downton Dinner

So back to the party:

As I mentioned initially, we did receive a hand written response which was quite fun.

We had our menu and needed to set the table. There are several sites which address the proper table setting. I did not measure to be exact but it seems that no one thought to notice. Lucky this time!!

For a proper place setting one must have a white wine stem, claret stem and water glass. Then for the 9 course meal one needs a soup bowl, a plate for the fish, plate for the beef, glass for the punch or bowl for the gelatin, plate for the chicken, salad plate, desert plate and cheese plate. Flatware includes a salad fork, dinner fork, dinner knife, cutting knife, tea spoon, and soup spoon. Each place setting must also have a name card and a menu card.

Because we have a miss-mash of stems, china and flatware we had to scramble again for place settings. I went to the antique stores on Sat but only found 4 stems, 2 of which matched. Since there were to be only 8 of us the three new stems would be enough. We did have enough flatware using our 2 sets, but only for dinner. There were not enough desert spoons for everyone. We have ½ of a set of china, several place settings of Corning in the RV and then some from a friend which gave us enough. Fortunately, the rich would use several different styles of china in order to show that they had so much money they could use which ever setting they wanted. We took comfort in that.

The table is ready. Note the silver bell in front of the Lord Grantham's seat

We have porcelain place cards that are easy to clean for reuse but we had no menu cards. Very tacky for sure. But again no one called us on it. Maybe our guests were just trying to be polite.

A Vegetable Pie

One of our guests is vegan and in the interest of her enjoyment we had to have alternative dishes for our dinner. The Fish Vegan alternative dish was quite fun. 

I found a recipe for a Vegetable Pie and then made some changes. We thought we'd better try this dish a couple of days before the party just to make sure that it was tasty. In the interest of time I did not make the crust but rather made it more like a Shepherd’s Pie using a mashed potato top.

 Filling

2 Onions chopped

2 Carrots chopped

3 sticks of celery chopped

1 6-oz jar or can artichoke hearts

1 C. lentils soaked for about 4 hours

2 C. vegetable stock

Salt and pepper

4-6 potatoes

Sautee onions, carrots, celery and artichokes in olive oil until browned.

Drain lentils then add the lentils, stock and the sautéed veges into a casserole dish.

Cut potatoes into pieces then cook in the microwave or steamer until soft. Mash with vegetable broth to make them fluffy.  Cover the top of the veges with the mashed potatoes.

Bake at 350 for 45 min.

I baked the veges without a crust, then put some into a smaller dish and added the hot mashed potatoes to the smaller dish for dinner.

For our party I put a serving of the vegetables in a small single-serving Pyrex dish and heated it in the microwave. I cooked 2 potatoes separately with a little broth then mashed them. I then put the mashed potatoes on the hot vege mixture and served as a single serving.

I think that the veges without the crust could be cooked on top of the stove using a little more broth and used as a yummy soup.

Here is the original recipe:

http://downtonabbeycooks.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/welcome-to-the-new-world-doubting-thomas-eats-humble-pie/

Downton Viewing Party Time Again

So I’ve actually cooked plenty of meals and even made some and took photos of some meals for this blog but who knows what happened? Life happened I guess.  And now we’ve had another Downton dinner, our 2^nd annual Viewing Party and there is so much to write about. This party occurred on the night of the finale, Feb 23^rd.

This year was like last year, I was busy working in Northern CA, finishing up a couple of weeks before the dinner. I thought that Dale and I would have plenty of time to get everything ready, 2 weeks off is like a year to me! Or so I wanted to think.

Last year we didn’t have time to eat our desert course and cheese course before the Downton episode started. This year we were determined to not repeat that, but rather have all courses finished before Downton started. We set the time to arrive at 6pm. I wanted for us to sit down at 6:45pm.

To get started I read the article on how to throw the perfect Downton party by Jessica Fellowes. The article advised to send a hand written invitation before the party. The invite had to say that we would be “at home” and ask them “to arrive at”. I found some nice plain cards that I could use. Unfortunately we were out of our monogrammed cards and there was no time to order more. I sent the cards to the Lord and Lady’s to be invited. I'll attach a photo of one response when I find it.

Selecting the wine

Dale and I sat down and made a master plan, unfortunately on Saturday before the party on Sunday, way too late. Then the master plan was not really a good working plan as I needed one that would have actual flow of the food. My master plan is a list of what food goes on the stove and when, when each dish gets served and when with which wine.

By Sunday morning, in addition to cleaning the house I made my master plan and we chose the wine. I was already on a really late start.

This year our menu contained both gluten free courses with a vegan alternative.

Here is the menu we made:

1. Appetizer: Smoked Oysters, Bruschetta, Baguette,    Iron Horse Chinese Cuvee, Pimm’s

2. Soup:  Cream of Potato Soup     Navarro Gewurztraminer 2012                      vegan alternative: soup with no cream

3. Fish: Poached Salmon with Mousseline Sauce   Armida Chardonnay 2010

 vegan- Vegetable Pie

4. Meat: Boeuf Bourguignon     Downton Abbey Claret 2012

vegan- Mushroom Loaf with Red wine sauce

5. Palate Cleanser: Punch Romaine

6. Fowl: Chicken Lyonnaise      Pipestone Grenache Rose                                 

vegan- Vegan Chicken Strips sautéed with a vegan Lyonnaise sauce

7. Salad: Fig Salad  Champagne

8. Desert: Triffle with a Gluten Free Version, Vegan Ginger Cookies

9. Cheese: Cheese, Fig Compote, Baguette

A Warm Potato Salad

Maybe 30 years ago we had a girl, Pascaline, from Belgium live with us. We had to bring a dish for a pot luck party and she suggested a salad dish of rice, green beans, onions, oil and vinegar. Then her mom, Therese, came another time and made one of our now standby favorites: potatoes, green beans cooked together with a little butter.

We had some left over BBQ’d small potatoes, green beans and other ingredients. It was a warm evening so I’d decided on a potato salad.

Here is the salad:

Small cooked potatoes, chopped into bite-size pieces, just warm.

Green Beans cut up and cooked

A little onion chopped fine

Olive oil to taste.

A spoonful of mustard to taste.

I’m not crazy about vinegar so I don’t use it but you can to make the vinaigrette.

Mix the oil and mustard together, I find a whisk works well.

Add to the potatoes, green beans and onion in a bowl and toss until the potatoes and beans are coated.

We had this along with a green salad for dinner. Very filling!