Eggplant Boursin Panini

We stopped frequenting Ramsi's some time ago, after a few too many experiences of mediocre food and bad service. But that doesn't mean I don't still love their Eggplant Boursin Panini:

Lightly breaded eggplant, tomato sauce, and a trio of cheeses, served on homemade Cuban bread.

When we brought home some eggplants from the farmers market last week, Neil suggested eggplant Parmesan, but that felt like too much work and too much time with the oven on. So I decided to try my hand at recreating my beloved panini instead. The results were pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. Anyone looking for ways to use up their eggplant harvest should give this one a try!

1 eggplant (depending on size, of course, but one average eggplant provided enough for four sandwiches and a few snack slices for us)
Italian breadcrumbs
2 eggs, beaten
1 package Boursin (it won't require nearly the whole package, but use however much you want)
1 ball mozzarella, sliced thickly (ours yielded four slices and a chunk for snacking)
Shredded Parmesan to taste
Some sort of chunky tomato sauce business (we used Kroger brand bruschetta topping and it was pretty good)
Whatever bread/bun/roll you fancy (no Cuban bread to be found at Kroger, so we went with their sub rolls, which worked surprisingly well)

Skin and slice eggplant, then dip slices into egg and dredge in breadcrumbs. Fry in oil (or bake, if you want to be healthier about it) until golden. Spread a layer of tomato sauce on the bottom of the roll, and follow with mozzarella slices, eggplant, and a sprinkling of Parmesan. Spread a layer of Boursin on the top of the roll (the inside of the top of the roll, that is). Stick the whole thing in your panini press press or George Foreman (what we used), or, if you don't have any such thing, just pop it in the oven until the cheese is melty and the bread is toasty.

I wish I had a photo of this for you, but unfortunately, the ones we took did not really do the deliciousness justice. Just trust me when I promise you that it is fantastic.

Notes:
1. Depending on what kind of bread you use, the quantities might vary a little bit. Since we used oblong sub rolls, each sandwich used four slices of eggplant stacked two high, and a slice of mozzarella on each eggplant stack. But that's just how it worked out for us. This is bound to turn out delicious no matter how you do it, so don't worry too much about the details.
2. I think I've more or less given up on sweating eggplant. The only difference I can tell is that when I do it, even though I rinse it off afterward, the eggplant ends up way too salty. It's also a pain in the ass. The hell with it, I say!
3. Boursin is freaking expensive, around $6 for 5.2 oz at Kroger. Although it's kind of central to the Eggplant Boursin Panini, feel free to skip it or mess around with other cheeses if you don't want to spend that much. (Or, if you happen to be going up to Jungle Jim's, get it there. It's always much cheaper even at regular price, and we once found it on sale there for $1.99.)

Enjoy!

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Sesame Street

Yesterday I told Neil that I'd like to learn to make cheese. And I would. In fact, I think becoming an artisanal cheesemaker would be a pretty swell career move. Unfortunately, neither of us know much of anything about making cheese, and we realized that what we do know is what we gleaned years and years ago from this video:




Oh man, I used to love that video. (Though not as much as I loved the one about how crayons are made.) But does anyone else find it a little troubling that those dudes have such large and unrestrained beards and hair styles and are bending over the cheese like that? You can't tell me they didn't get hair in that cheese. Ick.

But I digress. Cheesemaking. I'm going to try it! Though I'm not sure how or when. I'll keep you posted!

Local goodies

I have been frustrated the last couple of weeks that Neil has had to teach on Saturday mornings, preventing us from going to the Bardstown Road Farmers Market. Yesterday I did some research and found that there's one on Sunday afternoons at Rainbow Blossom! (Just right for Lisa Lazybones. ;) It's open from 12:00 to 4:00 and they even take debit/credit. Hooray!

This market isn't as big as the one on Bardstown Road, but the selection is still ample. Pictured above is our booty. Why yes, this pescatarian will eat beef, if it's locally produced! Those patties were from Dutch Creek Farm, the same place we get our eggs from, which is not even an hour outside Louisville.

Dinner tonight was cheeseburgers made with that meat and topped (of course) with slices of tomato. We also had corn on the cob and a peach for dessert. And it was fantastic, all of it. Good god. Everything was so much more flavorful than it would have been if we had gotten from Kroger, and we got the added satisfaction of knowing that we supported local farmers and did something environmentally sound.

As a (suburban) child of the 1980s, even though I grew up knowing intellectually that produce comes from farms, in practice I didn't really think much about it coming from anywhere besides the grocery store. I also never had any concept of seasonality, since at the grocery store most things are available year-round, whether they should be or not. Produce was just one more static grocery item to buy, like cereal and soap and canned goods. Having spent most of my life feeling so utterly divorced from the origins of my food, every time I eat something local, it feels a little magical. This stuff was grown in the soil of the state I live in. It was not produced in some huge industrial operation across the country or across the world and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to reach me, cosmetically perfect and perfectly flavorless. (I can't lie; the peach we ate tonight was ugly. I never would have bought it at the store. But it was also the best peach I've eaten in years.) No, this food is part of my geography, and, by virtue of the fact that it grows here, is meant for me to eat it. Not to get too precious or self-righteous or ridiculous, but it kind of makes my soul happy to eat this way.

So go! To the farmers markets, and to the restaurants that serve local food! Enjoy the bounty of these waning days of summer. Re-remember or discover for the first time what produce is supposed to taste like. You won't be sorry.

A Few From the Archives

Just because I haven't been blogging at Blog Tartare, that doesn't mean I haven't been writing about food. Here are a few entries from elsewhere:

Gratin!
The Best Cheese Ever
Fake Meat Lessons Learned
Kalamity Katie's Border Benedict (sort of)

Hopefully those will tide you over until my next entry. :)

Here a blog, there a blog

Over a delicious dinner at the Dragon King's Daughter tonight, Neil and I discussed how we had each become as sophisticated as we are (which admittedly is not all that sophisticated) about food and beverage. Since I grew up in Shelbyville (which has a real lack of good restaurants, a few exceptions notwithstanding) and was raised by people who aren't particularly adventurous eaters or enthusiastic drinkers, I didn't really start learning about this stuff until I was around 22. We talked about the friends who turned us on to different ethnic cuisines, to beer, to wine. In the midst of this conversation, Neil expressed his disappointment that I had more or less discontinued Blog Tartare. "You really had something with that," he said.

"I did?"

"Yeah. You love to write, and you love to eat and cook."

These things are true. I recently started blogging over at Squarespace and have been using a Blog Tartare category there for my food entries. And that's nice. But I do sort of miss Blog Tartare. I miss its cute background. And I think it has a lot of potential as a food blog, as opposed to mixing my food entries in with other stuff in a regular blog. And Neil and I have certain projects in mind (finding the best banana split in the Louisville area, eating our way up and down Bardstown Road, etc.) that really deserve to be done on Blog Tartare. Now that I'm a full-time freelance writer (whoa!) I have more time for blogging, which also helps.

So... here I am again. Hopefully for the foreseeable future. Welcome back!

Oops.

I kind of forgot to update you on the end of our 30 Days of Not Dining Out, didn't I? We made it through most of the month, but things kind of fell apart during the last week or so. Still, two very important lessons were learned, and I feel that periodic restaurant bans will continue to serve us well in the future.

Lesson 1: Cooking is fun, especially when I do weekly grocery shopping and have food and recipes ready to go. I found it surprisingly relaxing to come home from work and cook dinner.

Lesson 2: I really prefer taking my lunch. A little bit of extra effort in the morning means I get to spend more of my lunch hour relaxing instead of fighting traffic on Bardstown Road. And it is of course cheaper and generally healthier. I even enjoy taking PB&J. How nice to open my desk drawer and have lunch ready for me whenever I'm ready for it!

In other news, I'm not sure what to do with Blog Tartare at this point. I love it (especially its background). But I don't keep up with updating it as well as I should, and I have too many other things going on elsewhere on the Interwebs. So I've started blogging about food - and everything else - over at volvita.com. You may wish to check me out there. One thing I might do is just cross-post the food-related entries over here. We shall see. But in the meantime you should come see me over there!

Days 6-13

Tis true, I have not been updating regularly. But rest assured, I have been continuing to observe the challenge and have cooked several delicious dishes since the last entry.

First, I must admit to a restaurant meal. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I had no choice. On Wednesday I had to go to Lexington for work stuff. Traditionally, one of my colleagues in our Lexington office would have taken me out to lunch, which is also technically against the rules, but I would have let it slide for the sake of professional relations. However, this did not come to pass, and I was stranded in Lexington without my trusty lunch bag. So I went to a nearby Indian buffet and had a plate of food, a couple gulab jamun, and an iced tea. Is that so wrong?

Highlights from the last week or so of the challenge:

- We made this chili recipe on the recommendation of one of my coworkers. It was good. I enjoyed the vegetables.

- My mom tried to get me to meet her for lunch last Saturday, but I talked her into coming over for breakfast instead. I made this spinach quiche (an old standby) and these raspberry muffins. Delish.

- We had a picnic in Cherokee Park consisting of pimento cheese sandwiches, chips and salsa, and grapes. Not very exciting or exotic, but it was the first warm day of the year, and after lunch we both read for a while and fell asleep in the sun. Perfect.

- Neil and I have this joke about him hating lentils. He doesn't, really; it's more that he hates the idea of lentils because they sound like dirty hippie food to him. I was determined to show him how yummy lentils can be, so I made this red lentil curry recipe. It didn't have quite the complexity of flavor that it seemed like it should, but it was still really, really good.

- Thursday night we made this recipe for ginger scallops. Neil wanted to invite our friend Devon over for dinner, and I wasn't too enthusiastic about this, because the other times I've cooked scallops they've turned out quite mediocre. And Devon is a really good cook, so I didn't want to embarrass myself. But we ended up getting good scallop-cooking advice from Devon, and dinner was fantastic. The secret to searing scallops: use an oil with a high smoke point, or if you don't have any such oil (we didn't), use a combination of olive oil and butter. Turn it up high and cook the scallops one minute per side. We did that and then added the scallops to the ginger sauce. Mmmmm. I love scallops and now I know how to cook them properly. Hooray!

- Last night we made panang curry using this recipe, another favorite I've made before. I also used these instructions for dry frying the tofu. The tofu turned out great. The curry was both delicious and inedible. Life lesson learned: do not let Neil measure the curry paste. The recipe calls for 2-3 tablespoons. Every time I've made this recipe I've used 2, and it's been just right. But Neil is a heat junkie and added a third. We also used a different brand of curry paste than we usually do, so that may have accounted for some of the heat as well. At any rate, I can't eat any more of it. I only made it through dinner by drinking two big glasses of milk with it. And I never drink milk. I probably haven't had a glass of milk with dinner since I was 12. Anyway, I think I might make this again this week with much less curry paste, because it's soooooo good.

We're just about halfway through our 30 days. It's still fun. I somehow magically have energy to come home and cook dinner; I guess knowing that I have no choice is enough to get me started, and once I start doing it I realize I'm having a really good time. One thing I'm not sure we're doing though is saving a whole lot of money. I mean, surely we are. There is no way that $100 at restaurants could go as far as $100 at the grocery store. But last month we spent $406 on groceries, and this month we've already spent $412. So we are on track to spend over $800 this month on groceries. And we don't even eat meat! Since we've never really done regular grocery shopping, we're not in the habit of shopping with an eye toward value. We save coupons but never remember to take them to the store with us. And I really have no idea what foods are more expensive than others or how much things are supposed to cost. I guess as we continue to shop we'll get better at this.

I have photos of several of the meals we've made lately, but it's Saturday morning and the camera is in the other room and I'm lazy right now. I'll do a photo post soon!