Eating Away My Feelings...

Since I’ve been here in Jerusalem, I have found that cooking has been a great stress reliever. I think experimenting with different spices and flavors is almost meditative. Creative processes employed in cooking indirectly help me negotiate some of the tenuous emotional voyages I have been on lately. I guess you could say that these days I’ve been doing a LOT of cooking. Ok, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration...I’ve been baking, too.

A while back I threw a dinner party for all of the residents in the guesthouse. The inspiration for the meal came from a lone can of coconut milk that I had sitting in my room. Before long the menu evolved to include a curried potato stew, roasted root vegetables, quinoa pudding with fried bananas and a Palestinian rice and lentils dish that my Palestinian guests politely shoveled under their napkins. Some “Ecumenical Accompaniers” (a group of international checkpoint watchers) in attendance asked if I would be willing to cater their farewell dinner. Whereas I can barely manage to throw together a sandwich for myself when I’m hungry; I absolutely LOVE to cook for other people. I readily agreed. Below are a few of the recipes that I compiled from the second dinner party. The measurements are by no means exact; as I tend to use a little red wine while I’m cooking (for my own consumption, not as a recipe ingredient) there is a whole lotta wiggle room.

An Accidental Sweet Potato Bake
(It’s accidental because the final recipes had none of the ingredients I had initially intended to use— that includes even the sweet potato)

1 Large sweet potato
1 small regular spud
1 pint plain yogurt
2 Tbsp sour cream
A couple of ounces of incredibly stinky Middle Eastern hard goat cheese. I mean like “who took off their old sneakers and threw up in them” kind of stinky. You can probably use feta and you’d get a similar result, but I think it would be really tasty with soft goat cheese. Play with and see what you think.
2 Pitas or I think a nice Rustic Wheat Bread would be good, too.
Up to one stick of butter
Ground rosemary
A couple cardamom pods
Black pepper to add a kick

Slice the potatoes and par-boil a little in order to reduce the baking time. Let them cool then place a layer of them in a greased baking dish. Alternate the two potatoes so their flavors are evenly divided. You’re going to have a lasagna effect when you’re done.

In a separate bowl, mix the yogurt and sour cream. Add the rosemary, pepper and break open a couple of cardamom pods. I have no suggestions for how much you should use. Wing it.

Put a layer of cheese on top of the potatoes. You don’t need to cover them completely. Then spread the yogurt mixture on top.

Put another layer of potatoes. And repeat until all ingredients have been used or you run out of room in the baking dish.
Cut up the pita into teeny little pieces. You can use a food processor, but it looks really nice when you cut it my hand into tiny weeny little cubes. Toss bread and a couple of hunks of butter in a sauté pan with some ground rosemary. Add more butter as needed, but don’t let the bread get too wet. It should be nicely coated with butter so that it will brown on top of the sweet potato bake.

Cover the top of the baking dish with the breadcrumb mixture and cover with aluminum foil. Let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. I let it sit over night. When you’re ready to bake it, toss it in the oven around 350 degrees while it’s covered. Here’s where the red wine makes my recollection a little fuzzy...I'm not sure how long it took for the dish to bake. Check it periodically. When you can stick it with a fork and the potato feels soft, take off the foil and let the top brown. Voila!

Here’s another one that everyone absolutely loved:

Roasted Eggplant:

1 Large Eggplant
1 Large Onion
2 Cloves of garlic
2 Tomatoes
Olive Oil
Salt
Turmeric
Black Pepper

Slice the eggplant into ½ inch thick rounds. Halve them again. Sprinkle each eggplant piece with salt and turmeric. Stack pieces on top of each other in a baking dish if necessary, cover and let sit in the fridge for at least a couple of hours. This will help the eggplants sweat out a lot of water; making them less bitter and easier to bake. Drain the pieces of all water before baking.

Coarsely chop the onion and garlic and sprinkle over the eggplant. Dice the tomatoes and toss on top.

Grind a little black pepper over the veggies and drizzle oil over the entire mix.

Cover with foil and bake until the eggplant feels soft. (It will look less opaque as it cooks) From time to time, check to make sure that the veggies aren’t burning to the bottom of the pan. If you discover that you didn’t add enough oil, you can add a little bit of water at this point to help it along.

This dish is always the first to go. No matter how many eggplants I use, the serving dish is always near empty by the time I get to serve myself.

Ain’t No Kissing Tonight Roasted Garlic Pasta
(For those of you who are about to crack about how I am not doing any kissing either with or without roasted garlic, you can shut it. You know who you are.)
1 Bulb of garlic
1 Onion
2 Handfuls of spinach, chopped
1 package of grape tomatoes, halved
Olive Oil
White Wine
More stinky cheese, rinsed. But improvise however you like.
Pasta of choice, cooked
Add Chicken if desired. I would probably cook it with the roasted garlic, onion and wine for the extra stink factor

Take the garlic while it’s still in its papery skin and cut off the tops of each clove within. Place garlic on a square of aluminum foil and drizzle oil over each exposed clove. Wrap the foil so it makes a little pocket and place in a baking pan with the tomato halves and a few chunks of onion. Drizzle oil, a wee bit of sugar and black pepper on the tomatoes and onion chunks. Bake for about 45 minutes. Keep checking ‘cause you might need to pull the tomatoes out sooner. Let cool and squeeze out the roasted garlic into a small bowl. Mash the garlic. Set tomatoes aside.

Cook pasta and set aside in a baking dish.

Sauté the remaining onion and garlic paste. Add chicken if desired. Add a couple of schlugs of wine. Then add spinach.

Mix the spinach, tomatoes and pasta together and sprinkle the dish with cheese. Cover with foil and bake until the cheese has melted a bit. Be prepared to stink.

You may have noticed that I don’t always put the baking temperature. That’s because the numbers on my oven are in Celsius and I must have missed that day in math class when we learned how to convert. Not like it matters, because our oven is impossible to regulate. Anywho, I have had a different experience with baking every time I’ve tried a cake recipe. For the dinner party, at the moment when the cake failed to exit the pan as proscribed, I realized that my layer cake aspirations were a bit too ambitious. There was only one logical solution:

Some See a Broken Cake...I See Trifle

I cubed my cake and set it aside in a Tupperware container.

Next, I took balsamic vinegar and powdered sugar and reduced it in a sauce pan until syrup formed. Then I tossed in a bag of frozen strawberries and a bag of frozen blueberries. I stirred until the berries had thawed and the mixture thickened back up.

Here’s where you can get creative. The easiest route is to bust out some Cool Whip and call it a day. Or, you can whip some heavy cream with a dash of vanilla and some powdered sugar. If you’re feeling very ambitious, plan ahead and make a custardy creme like I did. I took egg yolks, plain yogurt, sugar, a splash of vanilla, a pinch of nutmeg, a pinch of cinnamon, and a little cream, and stirred it for ages in a saucepan. Don’t let it sit or you’ll end up with scrambled eggs. I poured the mix into a (you guessed it) a baking dish, and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of hours until I was ready to use it.

When all three steps are ready, start by making a layer of cake cubes in a big glass bowl. Add a layer of berries, then cream layer, then cake, then berries, then cream layer, etc...I covered again and put back in the fridge until dessert time. I can say with 100% certainty that if I ever made this again, I sure as hell wouldn’t share it with anyone. It was “My Precious” kind of good.

That’s all for now. Just remember, the trick to making these recipes is to have a glass of wine in your hands at all times. Then, if the food turns out crappy at least you had a good time.