For the sake of my own well-being, and to avoid giving over my entire life to refreshing Nate Silver’s Twitter feed, I made a rule that I wouldn’t check my phone more than once a day, other than email. Instead I spent most of the weekend doing yard work in the lingering summer heat. I had an eggplant from the garden and ground pork both waiting in the fridge, along with a basket of red, yellow, and orange tomatoes, and I had the perfect recipe for them: Eggplant stuffed with pork (berenjenas rellenas). It’s a meal that seems emblematic of the Mediterranean, using the eggplant as a bowl to hold the other ingredients, and only the fact that it contains pork makes it clear that it’s from Spain and not Lebanon. Cut an eggplant in half and salt it to release the liquids, then cook on the stove in a mixture of oil and water for about eight minutes, until the eggplant flesh is tender. Once it has cooled, use a knife to scoop the eel-like eggplant skin into a bowl. Meanwhile, prepare the filling. Cook an onion and garlic and then add two chopped tomatoes, letting them boil about five minutes. Add half a pound of ground pork and season with salt, pepper, cinnamon, and cumin, around five more minutes until the pork is cooked through. Add the eggplant pulp, cooking until the liquid evaporates. Then spoon into the eggplant shells and bake at 350 for 20 minutes.
(Photo: Museu Cau Ferrat, Sitges. Recipe is from The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden.)
365 Days of Food 