An aubergine encore
Stuffed aubergines with potato wedges
Serves: 4 people
Takes: 45 minutes
Ingredients
6 finely diced shallots
4 cloves chopped garlic
light cooking oil
2 large aubergines
2 blocks frozen firm tofu
50 g dried porcini mushrooms
6 T tomato paste
2 T miso
2 t smoked paprika
2 t dried thyme
4 diced medjool dates (remove stones)
100 g finely chopped walnuts
breadcrumbs from 2 pieces sourdough bread
to garnish: Italian parsley, good olive oil and sumac powder
Method
At least one hour before cooking, remove tofu from freezer and allow to thaw (or pop it in the microwave for 1 minute to speed this step up). Place in a sieve or colander with a weight on top so that any liquid drains out.
Pre-heat oven to 200°C, fanbake.
Cook shallots and garlic in frying pan on a low to medium heat with a little cooking oil until softened.
Pre-soak your porcini mushrooms in 50 ml boiling water.
Crumble the tofu with your hands and squeeze out as much of the liquid as you can. Then finely mince on a chopping board. Add to the frying pan.
Cut aubergines in half, and carefully score the flesh before removing with a large spoon. You want to leave at least 1 cm of flesh on the skin. Oil the aubergines and place on a tray with the oven.
(Note: I served the aubergine with potato wedges. If you want to do this step, use around 1 kg of potatoes for 4 people, chop roughly (without peeling), oil your pan, and throw your potato wedges on a tray in the oven now as well, dusted with some salt, dried thyme and paprika.)
Finely chop the aubergine flesh and add to the frying pan. Stir regularly to prevent sticking. Slowly brown the aubergine and tofu.
Roughly chop the porcini mushroom and add to the frying pan along with the liquid.
Add walnuts and the other condiments: 6 T tomato paste, 2 T miso, 2 t smoked paprika, 2 t dried thyme, 4 diced medjool dates. Stir well to combine.
Keep cooking your veggie mince until it is well browned. Add salt and pepper to taste.
If making breadcrumbs, as I do, toast your sourdough, pop into a blender and pulse for up to 1 minute.
Remove aubergines from oven, stuff with the veggie mince, pressing down well, and top with breadcrumbs and a swig of olive oil. Replace tray in oven.
Bake your stuffed aubergines for approximately 20 minutes in oven, until the breadcrumbs are golden brown.
To serve: plate the aubergines and garnish with chopped Italian parsley, pepper, olive oil and a sprinkle of sumac powder. Consider serving with a side of potato wedges and a green salad (as pictured above). Enjoy!
The story behind the recipe…
Well friends, I’ve doubled-back and cooked aubergines again, because they are one of my favourite vegetables. This dish is a last hurrah before their time is over. We are in the shoulder season, the weather prevaricating wildly between summer and autumn, one night thunderstorms so spectacular that I open the curtains and fall to sleep with white flashes of lightning, a few days later sitting in the back garden of our new house (still very much a construction site), baking in the sun. The morning sunrises are stunning right now, soft pinks and peaches, the sun a giant red ball.
Most people know I am not the world’s greatest fan of fake meat options, and this is definitely not an attempt to make something that resembles or tastes like mince. At the same time, I’m really excited to share this recipe for veggie mince, which can definitely be used as a substitute in recipes that call for the meaty variety. It has crunch and depth of flavour from the umami powerhouses (tomato paste, miso, porcini), as well as a surprising lightness. Freezing tofu extracts a lot more of the liquid, giving it a quite different, honeycomb-like texture. Once thawed, it crumbles superbly and minces well. It is the perfect base for the mince, giving it a healthy dose of protein along with the walnuts, and soaking up all of the flavours you’ve added. Combine that with the softness of the aubergine shell, and you have a really great meal. And if you don’t want aubergines at all, make this mince with whatever veggies you have to hand (grated carrots, beetroot and celery quickly come to mind), and use it as a base for a vegetarian spaghetti bolognese, as we did tonight with the leftover mince. Or just eat it by the forkful, cold from the fridge. It is really that good, I promise.
I recently listened to a podcast with the New Yorker restaurant critic Hannah Goldfield. She talked about the challenge of writing about food, and the limitations of language:
“There are just only so many ways to say ‘crunchy.’ There's ‘crunchy,’ there's ‘crisp,’ there's ‘crispy,’ you can say something ‘crackles,’ and that's kind of it. It's really, really hard. And a lot of things are crunchy. It's a really specific sensation that needs to be described. But I've had moments where I'm like, I can't say crunchy again in a sentence. What am I going to do? How do I get this across?”
She also tries to avoid ever using the word delicious. But if you’ve read her column for long enough, you’ll start to notice inescapable habits of language. Egg yolks are often jammy, broccoli rabé is often in a tangle. It made me think about my own philosophy of writing about food, my own inbuilt default settings, the difficulty of avoiding tired metaphors. For me, writing about food isn’t so much, or only, about writing about taste. Although words do have work to do here, because how do you capture the flavour bomb of using porcini with a photograph? But writing is much more about what the food evokes, the way it connects place and people, the way it compresses, folds and stretches out time. You are in The Netherlands cooking aubergine and at the same time, you are back in your childhood kitchen, learning how to cook aubergine and tofu for the first time, adding it to a stirfry, cooked in an electric wok, Sean Paul blasting on your CD player.
Back in lock-down days during the pandemic - it now feels like a lifetime ago - one of the highlights was doing Zoom dinner parties with friends, cooking and then eating the same meals together, sharing snaps of our steaming bowls before we dug in. We did Alison Roman’s creamy cauliflower pasta, J. Kenji López-Alt’s spectacular vegan chilli (eyes streaming from dry-roasting the chillies), and then, one night, a four-hour epic aubergine party, with five courses of aubergine, including an aubergine dessert that I can’t quite bring myself to recommend to you, as fun as it was. And that memory has also embedded itself into the story of what aubergines mean to me.
Whether you’re trying out the stuffed aubergines this week, or whether you find a way to make this veggie mince and incorporate it into another dish, do give me a shout! It is always so gratifying and cool to know that people are trying the recipes and I always welcome feedback.
Thanks for reading this week!
Amelia.
One I’m going to try out. Thanks xx