In This Issue
• It’s Eggplant Season, So Baba Ghanoush, Baby!
• Webinar Next Friday Features Local Startup Success Fillo’s Beans
• Take a Quiz (It’s About Eggplant)
Baba Ghanoush, Baby!
Eggplant’s in season and it’s easy (if messy) to make at home
I love Middle Eastern food, and one of my favorite dishes is baba ghanoush, the savory eggplant and tahini dip. It’s an oversimplification but you can think of baba ghanoush as hummus only with eggplant instead of chick peas.
While many people love eggplant and cook with it fearlessly, others find it a bit intimidating. How do you handle this big purple fruit that seems to have a million tiny seeds?
It depends on what you are cooking with this ingredient that is popular in Mediterranean cuisine. For instance, you can slice and fry it for Italian eggplant parmigiana or cube it and stew with a variety of vegetables in a French ratatouille.
Farther east in the Mediterranean is baba ghanoush country. The process is pretty simple. Roast eggplant until it softens (and collapses a bit on itself), let cool and then scoop out the flesh. Then combine with tahini (sesame paste), lemon juice, salt and pepper, and break out that pita bread.
Now here’s the only catch, and it requires a trigger alert for those who have food texture issues. It’s a bit of work to peel the roasted eggplant skin, it’s kind of messy, and if you have those texture issues, you might want to have someone else in the household do it for you. It ain’t pretty, but it’s totally worth it.
Not to mention eggplant’s nutritional value as it is a good source of fiber, copper, manganese, Vitamin B-6 and thiamine plus other vitamins and minerals (according to Medical News Today).
The following is a recipe I adapted from Mark Bittman’s cookbook How to Grill Everything. I have a long been a big Bittman fan, and I highly recommend this book. We don’t even have an outdoor grill but this book is full of recipes to which I refer often.
Baba Ghanoush
Ingredients
2 lbs. eggplant
1/3 c. tahini
1/4 c. fresh lemon juice
2 large cloves fresh garlic
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil and chopped fresh parsley for garnish (optional)
Directions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees, and cook the eggplant for roughly an hour. It should be softened and somewhat collapsed, and the skin may be slightly charred.
Allow to cool, then remove the skin and place the flesh in a bowl or container.
Mash the flesh with a fork or masher (or with your hands if you really don’t have texture issues).
In a separate bowl, mix the tahini and lemon juice until smooth, then add the garlic, salt and pepper and mix again.
Combine the tahini sauce with the eggplant, mix throughly, and it is ready to eat or refrigerate.
Webinar Next Friday Features Local Success Fillo’s
Join our friends at Naturally Chicago next Friday (July 23) to learn about one of the rising stars on the local Good Food scene: Fillo’s Americas Made. This free event takes place from 9 to 10 a.m. central time.
The topic is How to Succeed at Capital Raising, with takeaways from guest speaker Dan Caballero, co-founder and CEO of Sofrito Foods/Fillo’s Americas Made. Dan, a graduate of the Good Food Accelerator program, knows this turf well: He closed a financing round in March with a combined $2 million in investments from Spiral Sun Ventures, Sustainable Local Food Investment Group (SLoFIG) and Clover Vitality.
You don’t bring in that kind of money without a quality product that has already built an enthusiastic customer base. Since just 2016, the company has produced bean dishes with a variety of Latin American flavors — and has grown from three recipes to 10 in just five years. The products are super-convenient, packed in microwaveable pouches that heat the food in just 60 seconds.
You can now find Fillo’s beans on shelf in more than 3,500 stores nationwide, including all Whole Foods Market, Sprouts and The Fresh Market locations (plus many Publix stores).
And what’s very cool is that the company is mission-driven. Their products are vegan friendly, the company is minority-owned (Dan’s family is Cuban and Panamanian), and it sources its beans within the Chicago region (Michigan).
Click below for free registration.
Take a Quiz
Eggplant is related to which of the following crops?
a) Tomato
b) Zucchini
c) Rhubarb
d) Peach
Answer: a). Eggplant is a member of the nightshade plant genus Solanum and is related to the tomato as well as the potato and chili peppers.