Spicy eggplant!

Eggplant is one of those weird vegetables - it seems to take a lot of thinking to find the "right" recipe for it. And it either turns out fabulous or really crappy, no in between!

I was looking for a side to go with some dosas a few days ago, and realized I had some really fresh indian eggplant waiting to be cooked up. After much dithering, I decided to go with a simple, straightforward recipe - stuffed & baked. After slicing off the tops of the little eggplants, I made a cross cut lengthwise in each of those - for filling with the stuffing. I had some sambar powder that I'd made a few days ago - seemed like the perfect filling. I loaded up the eggplants with the powder+salt, spritzed them with some oil spray and baked them for about 15 minutes at 400 F. For the first time ever, I garnished these with some chopped fennel - the combination of flavors was awesome!


Hmm ... this is an odd picture, these look more like dates than eggplants!!! :)

Yay! Dosas!

Dosas always make me happy. Very happy! And this time, they made Stephanie & Shawn super happy too! They were long overdue for a south indian food tasting, so the makings were pretty traditional. Figured I'd go with a chutney, sambar and some veggies.

The chutney was super simple, and turned out awesome! I just blended a bunch of cilantro, bengal gram, couple of green chillies and seasoned it with lemon-ginger juice and salt. Yummy!

The sambar was a little different - no coconut this time since Stephanie is not a fan of it. No onions either. So, it was a simple broccoli sambar. I love the earthy texture and flavor that coconut lends to the sambar spices, so I figured I needed some other flavor to compensate for it - I went with some pureed tomatoes instead. It turned out pretty good!

The highlight though was the grilled sunburst squash. I just chopped up the squash and marinated it for about 15 minutes in a lemon-ginger-garlic-olive oil marinade before grilling the bits. The flavors were fabulous! The Ballard and Redmond farmers markets have been carrying some awesome squashes this summer - am truly going to miss the sunbursts (along with the sunshine!) when summer is gone :(