Roasted Eggplant & Lentil Dip

Like Spanish tapas, the Arabic tradition of mezze involves small dishes that are hugely flavorful.  Most are very simple to prepare — in fact, there are plenty of single-ingredient mezze, like the olives pictured here.  There are also two- and three-ingredient small dishes that just involve a bit of spice or oil added to the main ingredient.  In this assortment, you can see a chunk of sheep’s-milk Feta drizzled with a touch of extra-virgin olive oil and a sprinkling of sumac.  (Before you gasp aloud, yes, there are poisonous varieties of sumac that you should never eat.  This kind of dried and powdered sumac berry, however, belongs to the deliciously edible sumac family.)  You can serve several mezze together to make a meal, or you can serve one or two as appetizers to the main course.

Eggplant & Lentil Dip

Although a dip may not seem like a dinner, when you blend in a good helping of lentils (or chickpeas or other legumes), you wind up with a very hearty dip that’s a meal in and of itself.  Serving it with a few other simple mezze as I’ve done here makes for an easy, satisfying meal.

1 eggplant, peeled and cut into 1″ slices
1 cup lentils
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 T. tahini
1 T. sweet paprika
2 tsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. ground coriander
1/2 tsp. ground allspice
1 tsp. sea salt
Juice of 1/4 lemon
1 tsp. sumac (optional)*

Lay out eggplant slices on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper or aluminum foil, then roast eggplant at 375F for 20-30 minutes or until slices are golden brown and shriveled around the edges. Bring a medium pot halfway full of water to a boil on the stove and add lentils. Reduce heat to low and let them simmer for about 20 minutes or until they’re tender to your tooth.

While eggplant is roasting, drizzle enough oil into a saucepan to just cover the bottom. Heat over medium heat for 1 minute, then add onions and cook them for 5 minutes or until they’re translucent and starting to turn golden brown. Stir in garlic and continue to cook for another 2-3 minutes or until garlic is soft and onions are browning.

Blend roasted eggplant, cooked lentils, sautéed onions and garlic, and all remaining ingredients in a food processor until you have a fairly smooth mixture. Add water if it seems too thick, or add more lemon juice if you’d like it to be more tangy. The sumac has a lemony, tart flavor all on its own, so if you use sumac, you may not need more lemon juice; if you don’t have sumac on hand, though, you may need more lemon juice. You may also wish to use more or less salt, depending on your preferred level of saltiness.

Serve dip on its own or as part of a larger mezze plate, sprinkling it with a dash of additional sumac if you like.  Toasted pita chips, tortilla chips, or any other whole-grain and crunchy dippables go well with the eggplant dip.  So do raw veggies like carrots, cucumbers, and zucchini.  Leftover dip can be kept in the refrigerator for up to five days.

Enjoy!

* Sumac is lovely Mediterranean spice that provides a tart, fresh flavor — you can include it as a main spice, or you can sprinkle it over foods as a tasteful garnish, much like the way we’re accustomed to using parsley and paprika. Sumac can be found at Arabic grocery stores or well-stocked spice shops like Penzey’s Spices.

Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream

I was lucky — as a kid, I had the pleasure of visiting a local ice cream shop that made (and still makes, as far as I know) its own ice cream.  It was creamier and tastier than anything you could buy in a store.  Although all of their flavors were fantastic, my far-and-away favorite was the pumpkin ice cream they only made between Halloween and Christmas.  Ice cream in the summer was grand, but Ray’s Pumpkin Ice Cream in the winter was even better.

Since I had a half-can of organic pumpkin left over from making pumpkin bread yesterday, I decided to give my own pumpkin ice cream a shot.  (Literally … I included a shot of rum.)  In lieu of heavy cream — I only had whole milk on hand — I added a few extra egg yolks, then threw in a few of my favorite spices.  The result was a not-too-rich, very pumpkin-y ice cream that tasted a lot like the inside of a pumpkin pie.  In short, I’d say that making your own pumpkin ice cream is so easy that you can enjoy a bowl of pumpkin ice cream even in the sweltering depths of July.  (If you’re a big pumpkin fan, you might want to stock up on canned pumpkin while it’s plentiful in stores — the organic pumpkin at Trader Joe’s is particularly nice, but they only stock it seasonally.  Whole Foods does stock organic pumpkin year-round, though.)

Note on making ice cream: the more fat you include (in the form of heavy cream, coconut cream, or egg yolks) and the more liquor you include (plain vodka and rum work best), the less frozen the ice cream will get.  If you like your ice cream soft, use more yolks; if you like it to freeze harder, use fewer yolks or skip the booze.  Don’t use more than one shot of booze per batch, because 1. odds are the rum/vodka flavor will be too pronounced and 2. the ice cream probably won’t freeze well.

Sugar also helps modulate the freezing consistency, but I prefer less-sugary ice cream, so I use natural sweeteners that don’t have much effect on the how hard the ice cream gets, both because there’s simply less sweetener in my ice cream vs. a commercial brand and because I use sweeteners like maple syrup and molasses rather than refined white sugar.  I’d rather control the consistency by upping or decreasing the fat content.  Note that you are consuming uncooked yolks, so be sure to at least get organic eggs; if you have access to local eggs from a local farmer, so much the better.  I wouldn’t recommend using 99-cents-a-dozen eggs in a raw situation.

Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream

1 cup whole milk, preferably from grass-fed cows (Calder’s and Organic Valley are good choices)
1 cup canned pumpkin, preferably organic (it really does taste better!)
3-4 egg yolks (3 if you like harder ice cream, 4 if you like softer ice cream), preferably from pastured hens
2/3 cup maple syrup
1 shot of unflavored rum
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground allspice
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground cloves

Place all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into an ice cream maker and freeze according to manufacturer’s instructions. (Mine takes about 20 minutes to churn the blended mixture into a frozen cream.)

Enjoy!

Using a French press, add a pinch of cardamom and a bit of allspice to the coffee grounds.  Make coffee as usual.  Fill your coffee cup halfway with coffee and halfway with vanilla-flavored hazelnut milk.  Add a cinnamon stick for decoration and to use as a stir-stick.

I used coffee I brought back from Costa Rica, but I’m sure standard coffee would do the trick.

Allspice is widely used in the cuisines of Britain, Scandinavia, Turkey, Lebanon, Ethiopia, and in the Caribbean.  It’s one of the elusive components of jerk seasoning.  If you don’t have allspice on hand, you can substitute a lesser amount of cloves or a very small amount of cardamom.