Caponata for Bears
May. 30th, 2009 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWe can haz Bears! Despite upheavals, our visitors have arrived, and I have cooked caponata for them. If you asked me, I would say I used the recipe in Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, but I don't follow it all that faithfully - she suggests, for example, that you cook the celery and aubergine separately, thus using three saucepans instead of one - and on this occasion I wandered further than usual from the text. Since it worked, I'm writing it down while I still remember what I did.
Make tomato sauce: soften onions and garlic in oil, add celery (sliced thickly) and then tomatoes.
Rinse aubergine, add, stir well, turn the heat down as far as possible and leave until aubergine is soft but not disintegrating - about half an hour?
Add chopped capers and walnuts.
Serve hot or cold, and stir in the chopped parsley at the last minute.
Normally I'd chop the olives and add them with the capers, but GirlBear is still cautious about olives (though she's working on it) so I put the jar on the table, and we helped ourselves, which meant we could also spoon the oil onto the accompanying pasta (memo to self: re-order pistou olives) - that worked.
The walnuts are not canonical - the recipe says anchovies or pine kernels, and I usually use anchovies, so I hadn't checked that we had pine kernels, and we don't. But I liked the walnuts. Lemom peel might have been good - in fact, the preserved lemons lurking in the back of the fridge would have worked. What's the culinary equivalent of l'esprit de l'escalier?
2 aubergines, cubed (not too fine) and salted
2 onions
4 or so cloves of (smoked, as it happens) garlic
most of a head of celery
olive oil
2 tins tomatoes
plenty of capers (I used all I had, which was about half a jar)
walnuts (similar volume)
chopped parsley
green olives
Make tomato sauce: soften onions and garlic in oil, add celery (sliced thickly) and then tomatoes.
Rinse aubergine, add, stir well, turn the heat down as far as possible and leave until aubergine is soft but not disintegrating - about half an hour?
Add chopped capers and walnuts.
Serve hot or cold, and stir in the chopped parsley at the last minute.
Normally I'd chop the olives and add them with the capers, but GirlBear is still cautious about olives (though she's working on it) so I put the jar on the table, and we helped ourselves, which meant we could also spoon the oil onto the accompanying pasta (memo to self: re-order pistou olives) - that worked.
The walnuts are not canonical - the recipe says anchovies or pine kernels, and I usually use anchovies, so I hadn't checked that we had pine kernels, and we don't. But I liked the walnuts. Lemom peel might have been good - in fact, the preserved lemons lurking in the back of the fridge would have worked. What's the culinary equivalent of l'esprit de l'escalier?
