Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Eggplant Lasagna with Almonds, Mint, and Ricotta Salata

I know this may sound odd, but I occasionally think of eggplant as candy. When I was a kid, I’d grab a few breaded and just fried eggplant slices before my mother had the chance to layer them into the Parmigiano pan. I’d grab them off the oil-soaked paper towels, hot, and sprinkle them with powdered sugar. They were like zeppole, sweet, greasy, a little salty. If you’ve never tried this, you’re in for a treat.

I am the eggplant queen, or maybe the eggplant fiend. If you know me, you know I love the vegetable. Southern Italy and its eggplants are in me for good. Recently an incredible artist I know found himself painting an eggplant and somehow understood I needed to have the painting. So he made it for me. I am honored. Greg Decker created gorgeous eggplant art. He paints a lot more than eggplants, too. If you’re not familiar with his work, you might want to take a look at his website.

And speaking of eggplant art, a couple of months back I cooked up an eggplant lasagna with sweet spices, cinnamon, allspice, and ginger. I called it Eggplant Lasagna with a Hint of Moussaka. Its sweet savory edge reminded me of the faux zeppole I fashioned for myself as a child. I thought it was a success. And now, with the surprise gift of the eggplant painting, I’ve been inspired to think up another eggplant lasagna, with similar spicing but no béchamel this time; instead I’ve added two Southern Italian layers of ricotta seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg. I’ve also added mint, almonds, and basil. It’s a less formal lasagna than the béchamel version, a bit tighter. It calls to mind food smells I remember from my visits to Sicily. Ricotta, eggplant, and cinnamon are my new culinary triumvirate.

Eggplant Lasagna with Almonds, Mint, and Ricotta Salata

(Serves 5 or 6)

For the eggplant:

2 large, firm eggplants, stripe-peeled and cut into ½-inch-thick rounds
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
2 teaspoons ras el hanout
Aleppo pepper to taste

For the tomato sauce:

Extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large shallots, chopped
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1 teaspoon ras el hanout
1 teaspoon allspice
2 fresh bay leaves
5 or so sprigs thyme, the leaves chopped
A big splash of sweet Marsala
Salt
Aleppo pepper
2 28-ounce cans Italian plum tomatoes, chopped, with juice

For the ricotta:

32 ounces (1 large tub) whole milk ricotta
1½ tablespoons sugar
A big pinch of salt
Black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Plus:

1 ¾-pound chunk of ricotta salata, grated
A bunch of basil, the leaves chopped
A smaller bunch of mint, the leaves chopped
A big handful of whole blanched almonds, lightly toasted and chopped
1 pound homemade or thin, fresh store-bought lasagna sheets, parboiled.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Grease a couple of sheet pans with olive oil. Lay on the eggplant slices, brushing their tops with oil. Season lightly with salt, ras el hanout, and Aleppo, and stick them in the oven until golden and tender, about 20 minutes. You don’t need to turn them. Let them cool a bit on the sheet pans.

To make the tomato sauce: Get out a good-size saucepan, and drizzle in a tablespoon or so of olive oil over medium heat. Add the butter and the shallots, and sauté until soft, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic, the ras el hanout, the allspice, the bay leaf, and the thyme, and sauté until everything is fragrant, about another 2 minutes. Add the splash of Marsala, and let it bubble for a minute. Season with salt and Aleppo, and add the tomatoes. Cook at a lively bubble, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, and let the sauce rest.

Mix together all the ingredients for the ricotta in a bowl.

Get out a 10-by-14-inch rectangular baking dish, or one more or less equivalent. Drizzle a little olive oil in the bottom, and smear it around. Add a little of the tomato sauce, and put down a layer of lasagna sheets. Top with a layer of the ricotta. Sprinkle the top with ricotta salata and some of the mint and basil. Add another layer of lasagna sheets. Lay all the eggplant slices on top, topping them with more tomato sauce. Sprinkle with a little more ricotta salata, and scatter on the almonds. Put down another layer of lasagna sheets, and add the remaining ricotta, sprinkling again with ricotta salata and a bit more of the mint and basil. Add a final layer of lasagna sheets. Add the remaining tomato sauce, and sprinkle on the rest of the herbs and the remaining ricotta salata. Drizzle a bit of fresh olive oil over the top, and bake, uncovered, until golden and bubbling, about 35 minutes.

Let the lasagna rest for about 10 minutes before serving.

This 17-year-old Filipino woman is carrying a fish baby. She’s holding photos of the father. I can’t wait to see what the kid looks like. A beautiful union.

Recipe below: Minestra with Pumpkin, Farro, and Rosemary Gremolata

What a year. In June I contracted tick-borne malaria. Then my husband, who had recently had Lyme, came down with a mysterious attack of amnesia. And last week my sister suddenly needed brain surgery to remove a benign tumor. Now she can’t see out of her right eye, and her thoughts are drifting. This, her doctors say, will clear up in time, but she doesn’t believe it. All this with the Covid lockdown as a backdrop. I can’t say I’m feeling lighthearted. Summer is gone, and Tuesday is the election. Red wine helps. I love red wine, especially Beaujolais, but just about any decent red that’s not oaky is fine with me. Why do producers put all that oak in wine? Some of the Chianti and Rioja I used to love I now find undrinkable. I guess it started with winemakers thinking that Americans and Britons like oak because they have unsubtle palates. I hope the trend will come to an end.

And I love soup. Not thick a-spoon-stands-up-in-it soup but brothy soup with lots of good bits floating around. Also I feel that any type of minestrone or minestra (a lighter soup) must be kept under control. I’m not a fan of the kitchen-sink approach to soup. Even when I’m using up stuff in my fridge for an essentially cucina povera dish such as this minestra, I prefer to choose just a few seasonal vegetables, so each one stands out. There’s reason and elegance in this approach, I think. This soup is an orange-tinted one, by design. I thought of adding zucchini, but I decided against it, because I didn’t want to mess up the color scheme.

I hope you enjoy this cozy fall soup. And don’t forget to vote.

A note on gremolata: A gremolata is a fresh-chopped mix usually sprinkled on osso buco before serving. Parsley, lemon zest, and garlic are its most typical ingredients. Sometimes sage is added. Here I’ve included a little rosemary to pick up on the flavoring in the soup.

A note on farro: I cooked the farro separately in lightly salted boiling water until just tender and added it late in the preparation of the soup. That way it retained its individuality. The farro will swell up a little as it sits in the soup.

Minestra with Pumpkin, Farro, and Rosemary Gremolata

(Serves 5)

1 ½-inch round of pancetta, cut into small dice
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 sweet onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, cut into medium dice
3 orange carrots, cut into medium dice
2 cups pumpkin or butternut squash, cut into medium dice
2 yellow squashes, cut into medium dice
1 teaspoon ras el hanout spice mix
2 fresh bay leaves
Black pepper
Salt
A big splash of sweet vermouth
About 6 canned plum tomatoes, chopped
A few large sprigs of thyme, the leaves chopped
2 or 3 large sprigs of rosemary, the leaves chopped
1 quart light homemade chicken broth
2 cups cooked farro (see note above)
A few drops of rice wine vinegar

For the gremolata:

The leaves from a large sprig of rosemary
A handful of flat-leaf parsley leaves
1 small garlic clove, peeled
A pinch of salt
The grated zest from 1 lemon

Get out a big soup pot, and drizzle a little olive oil into it. Add the pancetta, and cook over medium heat until it’s browned but not completely crisp. Add the onion, carrot, and celery, and sauté until it’s all just starting to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the pumpkin, yellow squash, ras el hanout, and bay leaf. Add some black pepper and a little salt, and sauté a minute or so to coat the vegetables with flavor. Add the vermouth, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Add the tomatoes, the broth, and the rosemary and thyme. Bring everything to a boil.

Turn the heat down a notch, and cook at a low boil, uncovered, until all the vegetables are tender but still holding their shapes, about 20 minutes, adding hot water, if needed, to keep it brothy.

Turn off the heat, and add the farro. Let the soup sit on the turned off burner for about 10 minutes. The farro will absorb flavor from the broth and swell up a little. Add more water if the soup becomes too thick. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt and black pepper, if needed, and a few drops of rice wine vinegar to bring up all the flavors.

While the soup is cooking, make the gremolata. Simply pile the herbs and the garlic up in a little mound, sprinkle on some salt, and chop it up finely. Add the lemon zest, mixing it in.

When you’re ready to serve the soup, reheat it if necessary. Ladle it out into big bowls, and sprinkle each serving with some of the gremolata. The soup will be at its best served with freshly grilled or toasted bruschetta brushed with olive oil and a little garlic.

Recipe below: Mushroom Ragù with Woody Herbs

I’ve been eating a lot of beef lately—in stews, steaks, meatballs, hamburgers (lots of hamburgers). Maybe because of the new cool weather, or maybe it just fell that way. I actually feel kind of gross, pissed off too, loaded up with meat and sick of wanting all that meat. So to lighten up my head, I’ve decided to focus on mushrooms.

Sometimes mushrooms are just the thing. They’re like nothing else we put in our mouths. A vegetable-like food with no chlorophyll. I mean, asparagus and carrots are more alike than are mushrooms and potatoes. Mushrooms and truffles are similar, but only a select few of us get to eat truffles with any regularity.

A ragù is an especially good thing to make with a pile of assorted mushrooms. Some cooks make one with dried mushrooms, or partly with dried. I like that, and I do that, but this time of year, when I can get local oysters and hens of the woods, I use all fresh, usually selecting small amounts of those two special ones and then adding bulk with creminis or whatever ones look decent at the supermarket. They all have good flavor, and when united in the same pot, they give you a fragrant sauce that’s good on pasta, polenta, scrambled eggs, or ladled out in a bowl, with bruschetta for dunking. The sauce also makes an excellent lasagna, if you smother the top with béchamel and use a good amount of Parmigiano between the layers.

My herb garden is edging toward its weather-beaten stage, but its woody stuff, rosemary, savory, sage, thyme, still stands erect. Mushrooms can take a lot of herbage, so I used a little of all of the above.

Please feel free to use this recipe as an outline for cooking with your own favorite mushrooms. The more diverse your assortment, the better the ragù will be. So hunt around and go for the best. Happy fall cooking to you.

Mushroom Ragù with Woody Herbs

(Makes enough to go with a pound of pasta or 4 servings of polenta)

Extra-virgin olive oil
1 ¼-inch-thick round of pancetta, chopped
2 medium shallots, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
4 pints mushrooms, a mix of wild and cultivated (I used oyster mushrooms, shiitakes, creminis, and one small hen of the woods), cleaned and sliced
Salt
Black pepper
½ teaspoon ground allspice
1 small wine glass dry Marsala
1 cup chicken broth, or possibly a little more
6 canned plum tomatoes, chopped
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
A few large sprigs of rosemary,  thyme, and savory, the leaves chopped
A few small sage leaves, chopped
A chunk of Parmigiano or grana Padano cheese for grating.

Take out a large sauté pan, and get it hot over medium heat. Add the pancetta and a drizzle of olive oil. Let the pancetta brown, and then add the shallot and celery, sautéing until it’s all softened.

Add all the mushrooms. Turn the heat up a notch, and sauté them, seasoning with salt, black pepper, and allspice, until they start to soften and give off some liquid, about 5 minutes or so.

Add the marsala, and let it bubble for a moment. Add 1 cup of chicken broth, the tomatoes, and all the herbs. Bring to a boil, and then turn the heat down to low, and cook at a gentle bubble, uncovered, until some of the liquid is cooked down and you get a rich mushroom aroma, about 10 minutes. Now add the butter, stirring it in. The sauce should stay fairly loose, so add a bit more chicken broth if it gets too cooked down.

Turn off the heat, and let the sauce settle for about 10 minutes.  Taste for seasoning.

However you decide to use your mushroom ragù, I’d  top it with a big grating of Parmigiano.

Recipe below: Big White Beans with Leek and Fennel

Back in March I hoarded beans. Many of us did. I still have most of them. It turned out my La Bohème all-bean diet wasn’t necessary. I could still purchase ribeye steaks and scallops. Oddly, though, I think of beans not as an economy food but as a luxury, like ribeyes and scallops. Beans are the gorgeous flavor trappers in a cassoulet, soaking up all the wine, garlic, and various meat juices you add to the pot. And I’ve always thought of the cannellini-heavy pasta fazool of my childhood as exotic—chic even. It seemed like one of my family’s little secrets, with its fresh sage and hot chili flecks dotting an otherwise white dish. But of course, fazool is commonplace cucina povera, so I’m not sure why I felt that way.  Cecis have also been a longtime favorite. Dried, they seem so dead and hard that nothing could ever wake them up. But they do come to life after a few hours of slow cooking, bursting into vibrancy especially when tossed with good olive oil and a little sea salt. I imagine they were one of the things my ancestors lived on in pre-tomato Southern Italy.

Lately I’m into big beans, like the Greek gigantes ones, or a similar type called corona (not named for the virus,).  I buy a variety called Royal Corona from Rancho Gordo. When I want the big, fat Greek ones, I usually find them at Kalustyans. Those are both excellent, but I especially like the corona, because their skins don’t slip off during cooking, which I find extremely annoying as it looks messy. They cook up clean and firm but with a creamy center.

This dish, flavored with just leeks, fennel, and a bit of sage, is streamlined and I think quite beautiful. I like eating it as a main event, with a few glasses of fiano di Avellino and a stubby candle providing the only light.

Big White Beans with Leek and Fennel

(Serves 4 or 5)

1 1-pound bag corona or Greek Gigantes beans
About 2 cups chicken broth
Water
A splash of soy sauce
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 fresh bay leaf
½ teaspoon ground allspice
1 garlic clove, lightly smashed
3 thin, young leeks, trimmed and cut into rounds
1 large fennel bulb, trimmed and cut into small cubes, saving and chopping a palmful of the fronds
A big pinch of fennel pollen or ground fennel seed
Salt
Black pepper
A splash of dry vermouth
About 5 small sage leaves, cut into chiffonade
A drizzle of rice wine vinegar

I don’t usually soak beans unless they’re really dry. If yours are really dry, soak them overnight and drain them just before cooking them. Otherwise just put them in a big pot. Add the chicken broth, and then add water to cover the beans by about three inches. Add a drizzle of soy sauce, a drizzle of olive oil, the allspice, the bay leaf, and the garlic. Turn the heat to high, and bring the liquid to a boil. Turn the heat down low, and wait until you’ve got a gentle simmer. Partially cover the pot, and wait a few more minutes to see if you need to turn down the heat further to keep the liquid just simmering.

Check on the beans from time to time to make sure the water hasn’t boiled down too much and they’re still at a gentle simmer. The Rancho Gordo Royal Corona beans I cooked took about an hour. Older beans, like the ones you typically buy at the supermarket, will be harder and may take a fair amount longer, even an hour or more longer, so just taste as you go. When the beans are firm but creamy throughout, drain them, saving about a cup of the cooking liquid. Drizzle them with a little fresh olive oil, and give them a bit of salt.

Pull out a skillet large enough to hold all the beans. Get it hot over medium heat. Add a big drizzle of olive oil. Add the leeks and the fennel (but not the fronds). Sauté until everything is fragrant but still has a crunch to it, about 3 or 4 minutes. Add the fennel pollen or ground fennel seed.

Now add the beans, seasoning with a little more salt and black pepper. Stir for a minute or so. Add the vermouth, and let it bubble away. Add about ¼ cup or so of the bean cooking liquid, just enough to moisten the beans but not make them soupy. If you forgot to save some cooking liquid, use chicken stock or water.

Turn off the heat, and add the sage and fennel fronds. Taste for seasoning, adding a tiny bit of rice wine vinegar to bring up the flavor if necessary. I like to give them a final drizzle of my best olive oil right before serving. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.

And here‘s the recipe.

Women with suburban fish unite to save our country.

Recipe below: Eggplant Lasagna with a Hint of Moussaka

Eggplant is a big part of my life. When I was a kid it was always around, in our backyard garden, on our kitchen counter, in the oven, on our dining room table, bulbous and black, round and violet. It was normal food, the way string beans might be for most Americans. Nothing much has changed between me and eggplant. I know its smell both raw and cooked. Raw, it smells somewhat bitter but also grassy. Its texture is spongy. You really don’t want to eat it that way, although you could. It’s not poisonous. When cooked it smells mainly of whatever you’ve cooked along with it—garlic, basil, caciocavallo—but it keeps an underlying sweetness, and a creamy texture emerges, maybe with a faint hit of supermarket mushroom. I find its flavor irresistible, and when properly cooked its texture is unique. Soft but with integrity.

Eggplant is a vegetable (a fruit technically) that came from India to Southern Italy with Arab settlers in the ninth century. It is not, like tomatoes and chilis, a New world plant that slowly got worked into Southern Italian cuisine. Considering how much I loved eggplant from an early age, I don’t remember too many preparations from my Italian American youth. Parmigiana, of course. And then there were cutlets—breaded, fried slices that we kids grabbed before they got layered into the parmigiana. They eventually became a dish in themselves, because everyone loved their greasy crispiness. I remember eggplant rollatini filled with ricotta and covered with tomato sauce. There was also a vinegary eggplant shoved into jars. My grandmother made that, but we also bought it from Italian delis. Sometimes it was leathery. I’m not sure how it got that way, but I think it was from being dried out in the oven. In any case the vinegar-drenched stuff wasn’t my favorite, as I wasn’t a big acid eater.

I’ve since experimented with all sorts of Southern Italian ways with eggplant, such as eggplant “meat” balls and pasta alla Norma. I’ve gone wild for Richard Olney’s baked eggplant custard, with eggs and cream, no tomatoes. That was a recipe from Provence the Beautiful, an extravagant book that after a few read-throughs made me feel I’d been had. At some point I discovered the Amalfi Coast’s baked eggplant and chocolate dessert, a tourist favorite that you would think was a recent chef’s creation but in fact is a real traditional dish. It’s really delicious. If you’d like to give it a try, here’s a recipe.

I then went on to make baba ghanoush and many other North African, Middle Eastern, and Greek eggplant dishes, using spices not popular with my contemporary Italian people, who were more into herbs. Eggplant stuffed with rice or couscous or wheat berries and its own scooped out and put back insides, sometimes with whatnots of meat added. I did it my mother’s way, with garlic, basil, and oregano, and I did it Paula Wolfert’s way, with saffron, cinnamon, ginger, and cumin.

One of the most popular Greek eggplant dishes is moussaka, baked with ground lamb in addition to the eggplant, topped with a thick béchamel, and the whole thing seasoned with cinnamon. I love that. When I decided to make this eggplant lasagna, I think I conflated the two and unconsciously came up with a hybrid. But the funny thing is that my sweet spiced eggplant lasagna is most likely closer to what eggplant dishes tasted like in Southern Italy’s pre-tomato time, when there was a freer hand with spices than there is now. I was pretty happy with it. It’s still eggplant season in my New York habitat. If it is where you are, too, maybe you’d like to give this a try.

Eggplant Lasagna with a Hint of Moussaka

I used a 14-by-9-inch oval baking dish for this, but anything more or less equivalent will work fine.

For the eggplant:

2 large eggplants, partially skinned and cut into ½-inch disks
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Black pepper
A sprinkling of ground cinnamon

For the tomato sauce:

Extra-virgin olive oil
1 small summer onion, chopped
2 summer garlic cloves, thinly sliced
7 or 8 medium-size round summer tomatoes, peeled, squeezed of seeds, roughly chopped, and drained for 20 minutes (but retain any tomato water they throw off)
1 fresh bay leaf
A big pinch of sugar
A bigger pinch of ground cinnamon
Sea salt
Black pepper
A splash of sweet Marsala

For the béchamel:

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons regular flour
3 cups whole milk
1 fresh bay leaf
1 garlic clove, lightly crushed
½ teaspoon allspice
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
Sea salt
Piment d’espelette to taste
1 large egg yolk

Plus:

1 pound fresh lasagna sheets, boiled, cooled, and laid out in the usual way, which at my house is all over the place.
1½ cups freshly grated parmigiano Reggiano
A big handful of basil leaves, lightly chopped
A palmful of marjoram leaves, lightly chopped

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Coat a sheet pan with a little olive oil (you might need to use two sheet pans). Lay the eggplant rounds on it, and brush the tops of the rounds with more olive oil. Season with salt, black pepper, and a sprinkling of cinnamon. Bake until golden and tender, about 15 minutes or so. I didn’t bother to turn them over. They baked up fine without that.

Leave the oven on while you get on with the rest of the recipe.

Make the tomato sauce: Take out a large skillet, and get it hot over medium heat. Drizzle in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the onion, and let it soften for a few minutes. Add the garlic, and sauté until it’s fragrant but doesn’t take on much color. Add the tomatoes, the bay leaf, sugar, cinnamon, salt, and black pepper, and let simmer at a low boil for about 5 minutes. Pour in the Marsala, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Turn off the heat. If the sauce seems too tight, add a little of the reserved tomato water.

Drizzle some olive oil into the baking dish, and put down the layer of pasta. Spoon on a layer of tomato sauce, and then a layer of eggplant. Sprinkle on some of the grated Parmigiano, and then scatter on some of the basil and marjoram.

Repeat to make two more layers, ending up with a layer of pasta, holding back a bit of the grated Parmigiano for the top.

Now make the béchamel: Get out a medium-size saucepan, and set it over medium heat. Add the butter, and let it melt. Add the flour, and whisk it into the butter to form a paste. Let cook for a few seconds, to burn off some of the raw flour taste. Now add the milk and all the seasonings. Whisk everything to blend, and let the sauce heat through, whisking frequently until the sauce starts to bubble and becomes thick. Let it cook for about a minute longer, and then take it off the heat. Wait for a minute or so, so it can cool slightly, and then add the egg yolk, whisking it in.

Pour the béchamel over the lasagna, and top it with a final sprinkling of Parmigiano. Bake, uncovered, until the top is golden with little bits of brown and the whole thing is bubbling, about 25 minutes. Let it rest for about 10 minutes or so before serving.