Pickled Eggplant Two Ways

My first summer home from college was when I started teaching myself how to can food. For my mom’s birthday that spring I had got her two books on canning, The Ball Complete Book of Home Canning and The Joy of Pickling, with the intention that we could both learn how to can together when I came home. Somehow, however, I’ve been the only one to really use the books; Mom just didn’t have the same drive to can, I guess. One thing that I really enjoy about both books is that they have so many recipes for things I would never think of and that tantalize my taste buds just reading. And that there can be so many different variations on things. For instance, pickled eggplant. The Joy of Pickling has five different pickled eggplant recipes, three of which come from different countries in the Mediterranean. They all sound good, so I decided to try two of them; one to save for the winter and one that would be ready to eat within a week.

Pickled Eggplant Cubes

Makes 3 pints

3 cups white wine vinegar

2 ¼ lbs eggplants (2 good sized ones may weigh a little more, but that’s what I went with), peeled an cut into 3/8- to 1/2-inch cubes

2 tablespoons chopped garlic

¼ cup loosely packed small basil leaves (I love basil and I had a lot, so I probably used at least ½ cup)

2 teaspoons pickling salt

1. Sterilize your jars.
2. Bring the vinegar to a boil in a nonreactive saucepan. In 3 or 4 batches, blanch the eggplant in the vinegar for 2 minutes. Transfer the eggplant to a bowl with a slotted spoon.

3. Add the garlic, basil, and salt to the bowl, and toss the mixture.

4. Pack the eggplant and seasonings into pint mason jars. Return the vinegar to a boil and pour it over the eggplant, leaving ½ inch headspace.

5. Close the jars with hot two-piece caps. Process the jars for 10 minutes in a boiling-water

bath.

6. Store the cooled jars in a cool, dry, dark place for 1 week or longer before eating the

eggplant.

Now, before you make this let me tell you how it turned out: So vinegary I can’t stand to eat more than a single cube on its own. I smothered a few of them with hummus on a cracker and that was good, but still extremely strong. So far the most flavor balance I’ve achieved was with some pulled pork on a roll. But the best recommendation I can give would be to experiment with watering down the vinegar a good bit. Most other pickles that I’ve made-cucumbers, beets, mixed vegetables, carrots, beans, whatever-all use at least some water in the recipe and they’ve all turned out great. Maybe doing the blanching step in water and then pouring straight vinegar over them in the jars? Or just substituting half of the vinegar with water? If anyone tries a tweaked version I’d love to hear how it turns out. I’m also now looking for good ways to use up all of these intense vinegar bites if you have any ideas…

Lebanese Pickled Eggplant Stuffed with Garlic

1 ¼ lbs 3- to 4-inch long eggplants

1 garlic bulb, separated into cloves, the cloves peeled and crushed

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon pickling salt

½ teaspoon cayenne

1 ½ cups red wine vinegar

¾ cup water

I added a big handful of parsley from the garden

1. Sterilize 1 quart jar.

2. Steam the eggplants 5-7 minutes, or until they are tender but not mushy. Let them cool.

3. Slit each eggplant once lengthwise, cutting most of the way through. Mix the garlic with the 1 tablespoon salt and the cayenne, and stuff the eggplants with this mixture. Pack the eggplants into a sterile 1-quart jar.

Little burgers!

4. In a nonreactive saucepan, bring to a boil the vinegar, water, and remaining 1 teaspoon salt, stirring to dissolve the salt. Let the liquid cool.

5. Fill the jar to the brim with the cooked liquid (top the jar off with a little more vinegar, if necessary). Cover the jar with a nonreactive cap. Let the jar stand in a cool place for 1-2 weeks.

6. If you don’t eat the pickles right away, store the jar in the refrigerator. The pickles will keep for at least several weeks.

Just sampled my first one of these a minute ago and it was goood. Not too strong on the vinegar at all, so maybe I'd try doing a 2:1 vinegar to water ratio for the eggplant cubes next time.

Canned Salsa

Salsa really needs no introduction. We all know it. I’ve never met anyone that didn’t like it. Its colors make me happy. Its flavors make me happy. And summer is the season to make it. With jalapenos at 8 for a dollar at the farmers’ market, I had no choice but to make some to put away and some to eat fresh. Making salsa fresh is about as easy as it gets since you can put whatever you want in it. Making canned salsa is almost the same, you just have to follow a recipe to get the acidity right so you don’t risk getting botulism and your cans are safe to eat.

Here’s a basic recipe for canned salsa that I adapted from The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich.

Using regular tomatoes, makes 6 soupy pints

4 lbs tomatoes, cored and chopped (9 ½-10 cups); If you want a thick salsa, use plum tomatoes. If you’re like me and don’t care if your salsa is extra juicy, use any tomatoes.

¼ cup chopped garlic

2 small onions, chopped (about 2 ½ cups)

½ cup finely chopped cilantro

3 good sized jalapenos; In my experience all jalapenos are going to differ in spiciness. Best to start by seeding them but hanging on to the seeds. In case you can’t taste any spice from the peppers once they’re mixed in, you can throw seeds in little by little til it’s hot enough for you.

4/5 cup lime juice (or vinegar)

Pretty Cherokee Purple tomatoes from Mom’s garden

1. While you’re prepping all of your ingredients, sterilize 7 pint mason jars by immersing them in a tall pot of boiling water (the water should cover the jars by at least 3 inches) and boiling them for at least 10 minutes. Use a canning rack or a circular or rectangular cookie cooling rack small enough to sit flat on the bottom of the pot to elevate your jars enough to keep them from cracking. (“7 jars?” you may be asking, “But I thought you said this made 6 pints?” Take my advice and always sterilize at least one more jar than you’re supposed to need. Recipes run long or short all the time when you’re canning and while it’s no problem to have leftover sterilized jars that you don’t end up needing, it’s a pain to run out of jars and still have a whole extra jar’s worth (or more) of filling.)

2. In a large pot, bring all of the ingredients to a simmer. Simmer for 10 minutes.

3. Ladle the salsa into your sterilized jars leaving ½ inch headspace. Close the jars with hot two-piece caps.

4. Return the jars to the same pot of water you sterilized them in, return the water to a boil, and process the jars for 15 minutes.

5. Store the cooled jars in a cool, dry, dark place. Once a jar is opened, the salsa will keep well in the fridge for at least a week.

Curried Kraut

Alright patient food blog fans. I’m sorry that I have abandoned you for months on end with no posts. I’m going to start catching you up with my latest projects, things you could do right now with the present season’s available ingredients, and gradually work my way back through the last four or five months.

Summertime in Louisville

For the last month I’ve been hangin out at my parents’ house in Louisville, KY. When I haven’t been biking back and forth across town to see friends, I’ve mostly been occupying myself going to different farmers’ markets, canning, cooking, and rescuing random languishing vegetables from my parents’ fridge.

Exhibit A:

Sad cabbage.

The purple one was actually quite happy, as I had just purchased it from a farmer, but God only knows how long that yellow one had been aging in the crisper. It still felt firm though, so with outer leaves discarded, it was time to make a batch of sauerkraut!

This was actually the first batch of cabbage kraut that I’d ever made; my prior kraut-making had been exclusively with beets and turned out way too salty, but ended up making an excellent base for borscht. Driving out to Detroit with Olympia friends at the beginning of this summer, Taiga brought along a jar of OlyKraut’s (local kraut-making business) curried kraut and it was the most addictive kraut I have ever had the pleasure of eating. Gingery, garlicky, curry-y, and spicy, it was yellow and delectable and I instantly knew that I was going to have to make some later.

While my mom keeps a well-stocked spice cabinet, one of my personal household staples in Olympia, gingerroot, was notably not available. I knew going in it was going to be a flavor compromise to use powdered ginger in its stead, but sometimes it’s just not worth the grocery store run, y’know? Kraut is really quite simple to make and after the recipe instructions for the beet kraut let me down and oversalted me, this time was by feel. If you have kraut ambitions of your own, your first batch may well turn out saltier than you want if you use some of the more commonly recommended salt measurements, but it’s all to taste, so play around and see what you like. This batch turned out delicious, more robust and bodied than the OlyKraut inspiration due to the purple cabbage (the original had been all green), but I like it. Next time I will definitely use fresh ginger and chop up the garlic to get more zing per bite, but I like the way the flavors melded together using all powdered spices and it’s the perfect amount of tart.

Here’s what I did. I don’t have any measurements for you, I just shook stuff in, but if you cook a lot and know what you like, this is a great food for trusting your instincts and forgoing the measuring spoons.

1. Peeled the outer leaves off two medium-sized cabbages and chopped them coarsely (fineness of cabbage is totally a preference thing. I like the rough and tumbleness of what I got, but I think I’ll go finer for my next batch).
2. Mixed cabbage with about a teaspoon of salt in a large bowl. Shook in curry powder, ginger, turmeric and cayenne pepper to taste and stirred well. Threw in about a dozen whole garlic cloves.
3. Transferred mixture to a ceramic crock (I actually used a crock pot, but you can use jars or anything that you can pack the cabbage down into. Bowls aren’t ideal because of the way most taper, but if that’s what you got I imagine they would still work). Pushed the cabbage down with my fists until natural brine from the cabbage and salt formed and rose above the surface of the cabbage.

1. Weighted the cabbage down using an enormous (probably over a gallon) bottle of Heinz vinegar that I stuck inside of a gallon Ziploc bag to cover the bottom. The Ziploc bag was really just because I didn’t trust the cleanliness of the bottom of the bottle, but the point is to weigh your kraut down so that the brine remains above the cabbage. People use all sorts of different things for weights including Ziploc bags filled with brine. As long as your weight is big enough to cover the top surface area of your kraut, you’re good; a little smaller is ok, but for instance I wouldn’t want to use a quart mason jar as the weight for this batch because it would be too small.
2. Draped the vinegar bottle and rim of the crock with two thin cloths to keep out bugs and dust. Set the crock in a shady spot of our dining room. Left it to ferment!
3. Checked every few days to make sure the brine level was still above the kraut and started tasting the kraut after about a week.
4. After one month, the kraut was tasting good and tart. While I would probably have let it keep going longer, I figured with two weeks left in town I needed to start eating it now so I didn’t leave behind a huge jar that my family probably wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about as me… haha. Packed the kraut into one quart and one pint mason jar, pushing down to make the brine rise again before storing in the fridge.

Juicy!

P.S. Don’t forget: Fermented foods like sauerkraut are probiotics (supporting life and healthy immune system-boosting microorganisms in your body) and are supremely good for your digestion. Eat fermented foods with every meal! For more info, I highly recommend Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz.