Summary
| Yield | |
|---|---|
| Source | Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian + John Irving's The World According to Garp |
| Prep Time | 2 hours |
| Recipe Category | Side dishes |
Description
Healthy spread with very few ingredients + playing with fire = fun for the whole family
Ingredients
- 1 large eggplant (look for big and round = low surface area)
- 3 T Olive oil
- 1 T Lemon juice
- 1⁄2 t salt (reduced from original recipe)
Instructions
Prick the eggplant about a dozen times with a fork. (Or don't, wait for it to explode (kewl!), and start over.)
Pull the rack off your grill and set it on its highest flame. (Note: This is for my gas grill, which has a corrugated metal cover over the burner itself. You may need to adjust for your grill, but the eggplant really can and should be right in the flame.)
Roast the eggplant for ~20 minutes, turning with tongs ~twice. When done, the eggplant should be blackening but still have a little bit of brown or purple colour to its skin. (Warning: even charred-black eggplant is salvageable, but underdone is a pain.)
Pull the eggplant and let cool in a bowl for ~1 hour.
Drain any collected liquid.
Cut off the top (stem + leaves) and strip the skin off the outside. If the heavens smile upon you, the skin will come off fairly easily in large strips with few clinging fragments. (I do this under cold running water, holding the flesh in one hand as I strip the skin away from it with the other and frequently rinsing the whole mass to get small flecks of burnt skin out. My hands sting something fierce from some nasty chemical in the eggplants. Keep moisturizing lotion on hand!)
Warning: be careful to get as much of the burned skin off as possible. Even then, the eggplant will have a robust smoky aroma, but if you leave burned skin on, it will instead have a robust bottom-of-the-ash-tray stench.
Put the flesh back in the bowl and smoosh it up a bit with your bare hands. (Hulk smash!)
Dump all ingredients in the blender and process until smooth.
Spread on bread or child.
Notes
Note: recipe scales well. I usually make ~4x. Freezes OK, keeps very well in the fridge for several days. Unbelievably good on freshly baked bread just out of the oven. We'll often demolish an entirely loaf in minutes.
Backstory: Ever since I read The World According to Garp, I wanted a gas range so I could roast peppers for pasta sauce as well. Irving makes it sound irresistible! I still have no gas range, but my brother got me a gas grill, and I roasted a red pepper. It was fine. For some reason, I forgot during the Irving story that I'm not that fond of bell peppers.
Eggplant, however, is a whole different story!
And, what could be more manly than desperately skating through the misting winter rain across three months of moss accumulation in your Dorcs and then struggling to light your gas grill whose electric starter long ago plotzed so you can blow up some eggplant that you forgot to prick?