I have been less than enamoured with much of the food that I’ve cooked this week. Sometimes you get weeks like that. You feel all discombobulated, out of sorts if you will and it will reflect in your cooking if you let it.
I had a completely disastrous experience with a pair of aubergines* and a recipe that I culled from google. Let me elaborate.
Regular readers may recall that I had an aubergine in my fridge a couple of weeks back. It is forgivable if you don’t recall this. I was looking to make something a bit different, maybe involving pastry and approaching use-b y date vegan cheese.
I found a recipe, Sephardi Aubergine Pies. It seemed to fulfil my every requirement for a new dish: an interesting pastry (made with olive oil instead of butter/lard), stuffed with a yummy sounding filling (roast aubergine, feta and gruyere cheese mixed with Za’atar), turned into darling little pasties and baked. I can easily veganise this using some new plant-based cheese! Perfetto!
Actually, not perfetto. The dough was easy enough to prepare, beating together olive oil with some water and the flour. It formed a firm dough that didn’t require lengthy refrigeration to render it usable, thereby ensuring full stomachs, quicker. The aubergines needed charring over a gas hotplate, watching them like a fearful mother hawk as their purple lustre turned to blackened wrinkliness, like giant prunes.
Devotedly, I peeled every scrap of the black skin from those burning hot eggplants, and enjoyed the Weetabix-type smell that they gave out. I mixed them with the vegan cheese (“Greek style”), carefully adding a sprinkling of za’atar and got to work on the pastry. This is where it all turns to ruins.
The pastry was incredibly dry, dryer than the skin on an opened tin of gloss paint that’s been left out in the sun. I add water and then some oil. This makes the dough more workable but then it sticks to the work surface, despite me flouring it. So, I manage to make about 10 little circles. I am feeling extremely dubious by now because I can see how the dough is drying out and cracking before my eyes. I carry out regardless. I am not about to waste my aubergines! I spoon the mixture into the centre of each circle.
I attempt to fold the pastry up into a purse shape, as per the recipe. This absolutely does not work. The pastry is crumbling around my fingertips. I try another way. Folding them in half, like English pasties. They crack and break up. If there is one thing that irritates me more than anything, it’s an incorrect recipe or one that doesn’t tell you how to rescue a disaster!
My brain starts to frazzle and then eureka, it suggests I cook them as they are: open-topped. I weep gratefully and slam them into the oven.
Meanwhile, I decide to make cannellini beans with kale, just as a side dish you understand and in no way a back-up dish.
10 minutes later, the aubergine saucers are ready. The pastry looks dry, brittle and dull. Still, I dish up the beauteously simple cannellini bean dish and I arrange my little open-topped pasties alongside.
I bite into one. The topping tastes fusty and stale. The Za’atar is much too pungent for the delicate aubergine and cheese mixture and overpowers everything. It is an expected but nonetheless crushing experience.
No pictures exist.
Still, the cannellini beans are good.
*also known as eggplant
What do you think? Was it me or was the recipe bad? Sometimes online recipes are not reliable. I constantly cook from my own recipes, making tweaks if necessary. I also read comments from my visitors, some of which are blunt but really constructive (usually!).