Mo' fruits, mo' veggies...

A short while ago, the NY Times published an article on how best to cook your veggies to get the most out of them. Long and involved story short, you can't get everything from eating them prepared only one way. My response? Duh.

As for a solution? Eat some fresh, eat some frozen ones thawed, eat some steamed, and eat some sauteed. So in other words, cook your own food, and don't eat the same thing all the time. Different preparations, from a simple chopped salad or a tomato sauce simmered all day, free up different good-for-you things in all that produce. Even dumping a little olive oil on your salad or throwing a splash of red wine into your tomato sauce can change the bioavailability (aka, what can be easily absorbed by your body) of different things.

Actually, I'm embarassed to admit it, but in completely neurotic form, I used to rotate milk. One week I'd get skim, the next 1%, the next 2%, and the next whole. Occasionally, I'd throw in some soy milk. I knew about bioavailability in college, and to keep my calcium intake high, dispel any fears of not getting enough vitamin A or D (vitamin A is fat-soluble), and keep my arteries squeaky clean, I figured I'd just switch it up every week and cover all my bases. I know, totally ridiculous. Older and wiser - but only slightly less neurotic - I stick with 1% these days.

Heading back to the topic of fruits and veggies, I got to go to M&M Farms when I was visiting the parents and stock up on insanely cheap produce. I got a couple mangoes and a cantaloupe which I chopped up and had for breakfast today with some brie (Trader Joe's has some pretty cheap Canadian double creme brie; it's awesome). Tonight, I'm going to fix some baba ganoush, Israeli style.

I guess now would be a good time to talk about baba ganoush. Get a nice sized eggplant. Poke holes in it with a fork. Turn your oven broiler on high or crank up the grill. Insert eggplant (on a broiler pan if it's in the oven; it's a deceptively juicy vegetable), and grill, turning occasionally until it has completely deflated, resembles a dead thing, and has some char on the outside. The more char, the smokier the flavor, but don't totally torch it. Remove from the oven or the BBQ, and set it in a dish. Pick up the eggplant from the top using a heat proof holder of some sort, and leaving the top intact, slice it the long way from the midpoint to the end. Put it back in the dish, and tilt the dish so the juices drain out. Let it drain until it's cool enough to touch. (Draining the juices minimizes the bitterness.) Now you have a roasted eggplant to do with what you please!

Take the cooled eggplant, split it the rest of the way up the middle (the long way), and slice off the top with the stem. Take one half, and scoop out the guts onto a cutting board with a spoon. If some skin shreds end up in there too, no worries. Do the same to the other half. Now comes the fun part! Take a nice chef's knife and reduce the pile of eggplant guts to a pile of even mushier mush by chopping the crap out of it, flipping and rotating the mush with the flat of your knife and again chopping the crap out of it. Dump the mush into a tupperware.

As with pretty much all middle Eastern food, you need garlic and lemon. And in this case, tahina. For one eggplant, I'd start with 1 small clove of raw garlic, juice of 1/2 lemon, and like 1 or 2 spoonfuls of tahina from the jar. Crush the clove of garlic, juice the lemon, and throw it in with the tahina and a pinch of salt. Mix and taste, and then adjust everything. Also, you can cut the tahina with some mayonnaise, or totally replace it with mayo. I'm a fan of 100% tahina, but sometimes I cut it. Tastes good either way. Usually I end up putting in a little more lemon and salt to make the flavor really pop, but it's up to you to make it as strong you want it. Same goes for the garlic, but be careful, because you can end up with very potent anti-vampire concoction if you're not careful... :)

Another thing you can do with a roasted eggplant is roast and mush it like above and set it aside. Take half a small onion and chop it very, very finely. Take some cilantro and chop that finely, and add some lemon and salt. As with pretty much everything else, adjust it to your own personal taste. For some reason, I grew up referring to this as simply "eggplant mush." Baba ganoush was baba ganoush, but this was eggplant mush. No idea why.

Does anyone know what it's actually called?

Anyway, I just ate lunch at the food co-op, which was taco casserole. They serve vegan friendly bean mush in various guises on a daily basis. Today, it was a glop of beans, brown rice, whole wheat tortillas, tomatoes and tomato sauce, peppers, and vegan bacon and multiple spices. Despite its nondescript glop appearance, there was a hell of a lot of flavor in there. Then I opted for a chocolate Fruitfull frozen yogurt bar. It was ok for what it was. But I think I can do better... I need a set of these. When I was a kid, we used to blenderize fruit on the verge of going bad and freeze it into pops, with the occasional addition of honey or sugar or mint. Sometimes we'd make chocolate pudding pops. Very tasty.

I bet making adult pops with the addition of some alcohol would be really awesome. Like sangria ice pops. Or strawberry daquiri. Or any blenderized fruit with rum, tequila, or vodka. I bet a minty cucumbery one with gin would be so refreshing... a riff on this awesome drink, The Cuke. Unconventional, yes, but if the summer drank, this would be its Cosmopolitan. Trust me, try it. Your internal body temperature will fall instantly.