Farmer's Market Creation: Heirloom Eggplant Lasagna

Check out these babies! You're used to seeing the big dark purple eggplants, no doubt, but eggplants can come in a lot of varieties. I saw these at the farmer's market and I simply had to have them.

Notes: Oh sweet lasagna. Is there anything better than that layered, cheesy goodness? No way. I much prefer veggie lasagna to the meat variety. You don't have to cook the veggies beforehand, so it saves time and dishes. Lasagna takes enough time as it is.

Heirloom eggplants don't have the same bitterness that their large purple cousins have, so there's no need to salt these beforehand. Even more time saved!

Ingredients:
1 box no-boil lasagna noodles
3 small eggplants
1 26 oz jar of marinara sauce
15 oz. of ricotta cheese
1 large or 2 small balls of fresh mozzarella
1 tablespoon dried oregano
Salt
Pepper

Directions: Heat oven to 375.

Thinly slice your eggplants. Put the ricotta cheese in a bowl, season with salt, pepper, and oregano, and mix well. Set aside.

Grab your 9x13 baking dish and pour 1 cup of sauce in the bottom. Layer the lasagna as follows:
4 pasta sheets
slices of eggplants
1/3 ricotta mixture
more sauce

Repeat until you get to the last four sheets of pasta. Pour over the remaining sauce (you might need to add a little water to the jar to get out every drop -- you need the liquid to cook the pasta). Slice the fresh mozzarella and lay the slices on top.

Cover the dish tightly with foil and bake for 35 minutes. After the time is up, take the foil off and bake for another 5-7 minutes. Serve and enjoy!

Farmer's Market Creation: Okra and Corn Summer Stew

The days of summer are waning. Our local blueberries and strawberries have already exited the farmer's market. I am sad to see them go. While I still have the vegetables of summer, I'm trying to enjoy them.

Notes: Is there anything better than fresh okra and fresh corn? Nay. I've heard a lot of people claim that they don't like fresh okra because it's slimy. I've never understood that. Oysters are slimy. Okra is merely sticky. If you stew it with tomatoes, the stickiness goes away. So if you're trying to learn to like okra, by all means, try this dish.

Ever seen purple okra? Neither had I.

Purple and green okra with fresh corn

 I couldn't resist. Funny thing is, the purple color was gone after I cooked it. Who knows? It's just fun to experiment!

Ingredients:
1 bunch carrots
1 bunch celery
4-5 pieces of fresh okra
2 ears of corn
1 small onion
4 garlic cloves
1 28 oz. can of diced tomatoes + half a can of water
1 1/2 tablespoons dried herbs de provence
10-12 drops Tabasco sauce
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

Directions:

Dice carrots, celery, and onion. Mince garlic. Slice okra and remove kernels from the ears of corn. Add a tablespoon of olive oil to a large pot. Saute all the veggies for about 4 minutes. Season with salt, pepper, and herbs de provence.

Pour in the tomatoes and water. Add hot sauce and stir. Simmer for 30 minutes. Taste the broth and adjust the seasonings accordingly. Serve hot and enjoy!

Pictured with a homemade parmesan crouton

Farmer's Market Creation: Summer Corn Soup

Summer is the time for farmer's markets and that means the challenge of a farmer's market creation!

Pictured here are my farmer's market finds:

Wax beans, a golden zucchini (which I had never seen before), a regular zucchini, fresh corn, an onion, and fresh thyme.

Scott and I had some corn chowder at lunch the other day and I decided I'd like a tomato-based version a little better. So here you have it!

Notes: Fresh tomatoes would have been great in this dish, but none of them looked good to me. Also, I would have wanted to roast them to bring out more flavor and with the heat I've been adhering to a strict no-oven policy. So, I just used canned tomatoes.

I already had carrots and celery on hand, so I added them to the soup as well.

Stripping the thyme leaves is a little time-consuming (get it?), but since it is the only herb you need, it's worth the effort.

Ingredients:
3 ears of corn
2 15 oz. cans diced tomatoes
1/2 pound wax beans
1 large zucchini
1 large golden zucchini (you could sub yellow squash)
1 onion
4-5 celery stalks
4-5 carrots
1 bunch fresh thyme
Salt
Pepper
Butter or olive oil for sauteing

Directions:

Dice the carrots, celery, onion, and zucchini. Trim the ends off the wax beans and cut them into dice-sized pieces.

Heat a stock pot on medium-high and melt your fat of choice in the pot. Add the veggies and start sauteing them. Season with salt and pepper. Meanwhile, strip the kernels of corn off the ears of corn by standing the ear on end in the center of a large bowl. Run your knife down the side to separate the kernels from the cob. The bowl will collect the kernels for you. Add the kernels to the pot.

Pour in the canned tomatoes. If the soup looks thick at this point, add about a 1/2 cup of water. Stir everything together. Strip the leaves off the thyme stems, chop the leaves, and add them to the soup. Season with salt and pepper again and stir. Bring the soup to a boil and then turn it to a simmer. Simmer for at least 30 minutes, but more is always better.

Serve and enjoy the bounty of summer!

Farmer's Market Creation: Spelt Blueberry Spice Muffins

I cannot tell you how proud I am of myself for making this recipe.

It is the first time I've ever made up a baking recipe. I can make things up when it comes to cooking because there aren't any exact measurements. Baking is another story: it requires at least a little knowledge of one of my worst subjects, which is chemistry.

My parents were visiting and we went to the Swarthmore farmer's market. We're big breakfast people: we love eating breakfast out and making big breakfasts at home. We decided we wanted some muffins and found some beautiful blueberries at the market.

I have lots of cookbooks with lots of muffin recipes, but none of them looked that great to me. Plus, they all required baking powder. I have yet to restock my pantry completely, so I didn't have any. This lead me on an internet quest to see what I could use as a substitute. Once I started looking around, I decided I would piece together my own muffin recipe.

Notes: I beam with pride in telling you that these were yummy. I still kind of can't believe that my Frankenmuffins turned out so well. They were moist and flavorful.

These are not vegan, but I found lots of recipes for vegan muffins in my quest. As long as you have baking powder at your disposal and you get the amount and consistency of liquid right, I think you could make them dairy free pretty easily. For instance, you could add coconut milk instead of sour cream and more almond milk in the place of the butter.  You could probably add applesauce instead of eggs.

My dad was my guest photographer for the finish photo (he reads the blog -- Hi, Dad!).

Ingredients:
2 cups of spelt flour
1 cup of sour cream
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 cup of almond milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup of brown sugar
4 tablespoons of melted butter
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt
1/2 pint of blueberries

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350.

In one bowl, mix together your flour, salt, spices, and baking soda. Set aside.

In another bowl, add your melted butter and whisk in your brown sugar so that the sugar dissolves a bit (it will look thick-ish like molasses). Whisk in your egg. Stir in your almond milk, sour cream, and vanilla. Stir just until the mixture is smooth.

Add your dry ingredients to the wet mixture in thirds, mixing just to combine after each third (over-mixing makes for tough muffins). Finally, fold your blueberries into the batter.

Divide the batter into your muffin tin (I use the paper cups, it makes my life easier).

Bake at 350 for 18-20 minutes.

Serve them up for the breakfast-loving people in your life and enjoy!

Copyright to Dad Photography, Inc.

Farmer's Market Creation: Three Pepper Spaghetti

Another Farmer's Market Creation! Technically, this is a co-op creation, but since my co-op sells local produce, which is what I would have been buying at a farmer's market, I think it counts.

I originally created this dish in Mass after I went to the Pepper Festival. Exactly as it sounds, they had all sorts of different peppers. I knew next to nothing about peppers at the time, so I just picked blindly. I chose well because the dish turned out great.

Hungarian, Lilac, and Suntanned peppers

Now that I'm back in the northeast, I have access to grass-fed beef. Not to go back the food agenda I claim not to have, but being a vegetarian is the best choice when considering the way your eating habits affect the environment. So, as I've said, I don't cook meat home very often. But, if you are going to eat meat, grass-fed local beef is the kind to get, which is what they have at my co-op. I'm not a vegetarian and I don't believe that there's anything unethical about eating animals. I do think that if we are going to raise cows, we ought to raise them in a way that is (a) healthy for them and (b) healthy for the environment, and if we can't do that, then we ought not to raise them. But grass-fed beef does that. I don't advocate eating it all the time, but there are meat dishes that I love very much. One of the dishes is a good hearty meat sauce for spaghetti.

Notes: Rules for farmer's market creations applied here: make a dish entirely out of local ingredients that look good when you go to the store. I should have added something with a little more heat in it because I like my three pepper spaghetti a little on the hot side. It turns out the Hungarian wax pepper I used wasn't as hot as I thought it would be. The dish still came out great.

If you wanted to make this a vegetarian dish, I think some slightly mashed red kidney beans would be really nice.

Next time I will use crushed tomatoes from a can. Since I don't have a blender, I couldn't really make the tomatoes as saucy as I wanted. But, since the tomatoes were local, I figured I would make the sauce from scratch.

Ingredients:
1 box whole wheat pasta
1 lb grass-fed ground beef
4 small carrots
1 tablespoon chopped tarragon
3 peppers (2 bell, 1 hot)
2 tablespoons herb de provence, divided
7 plum tomatoes
Salt
4 or 5 garlic cloves, minced
1 onion
1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke
1 tablespoon dried basil
Olive oil

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400. Half the tomatoes and scoop out the seeds. Drizzle them with olive oil, salt, and half the herb de provence. Roast them for 25-30 minutes.

While the tomatoes are roasting, prep all your veggies. I like my peppers in thinly sliced strips, so I cut the other veggies to match them.

Heat a large skillet to medium-high and brown your ground beef. When it's just browned, add all your other veggies and saute until they're just getting tender. Add salt and dried basil.

When the tomatoes are finished, either blend them and add them to the skillet or just chop them and add them in. Add tarragon and liquid smoke. Let the sauce simmer for at least an hour.

Fill a stock pot with water, bring it to a boil, add two small handfuls of salt, and cook the pasta according to the box. I always find that I need to cook my wheat pasta for the maximum time.

When the noodles are done, add them to the skillet where your sauce is and let them absorb some of the sauce. Toss until everything is mixed together.

Dish it up and enjoy the fruits of your (and your farmer's!) labor.

Farmer's Market Creation: Braised Eggplant over Broken Whole Wheat Noodles

The Charlestown Market rolled around again, which means it's time for another Farmer's Market Creation.

This time, the intriguing produce was Japanese eggplant.

Should have gotten one more, but no matter

I saw a recipe for braised eggplant in Yankee* magazine and came up with a different take on it. This is kind of a deconstructed eggplant parmesan, complete with garlicky breadcrumb topping.

Notes: As you can see, I could have used more eggplant. The eggplant will fall apart some, but that was OK with me. If you want yours to stay together, either cut the medallions larger or shorten the cooking time.

I rather liked the broken noodles. I'm not sure it would taste any differently if they were whole. If you're shy about whole wheat pasta, I think the small bites actually help it blend with the dish better.

Ingredients:
3 Japanese eggplants
6 vine-ripened tomatoes
1 box of whole wheat thin spaghetti
1 cup Panko breadcrumbs
8-10 basil leaves
4-5 garlic cloves
1 small onion
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons herb de provence, divided
3 tablespoons plus 1 of butter
8 drops of Tabasco
1 capful of liquid smoke
1 tablespoon olive oil

Salt

Pepper

Directions:
Heat oven to 400.

Not from the market; no tomatoes this week

Quarter the tomatoes and then slice the quarters. Lay them on a baking sheet. Sprinkle them with onion powder, garlic powder, 1 tablespoon of herb de provence. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Toss to coat and roast for 25-30 minutes.

Put a large skillet over medium-low heat. Melt 3 three tablespoons of butter in the pan. Slice the onion and sweat the onion while your tomatoes roast.

Fill a stock pot with water and turn it on high.

Slice the eggplant into medallions. Mince the garlic, setting aside some for the breadcrumb topping. Chop the basil and set aside.

Once your tomatoes have finished roasting, add the eggplant to the pan with the onions. Add the tomatoes (including the roasting juices). Add garlic and basil, and put a lid on the pan. Turn it to low heat and allow to simmer for 20 minutes or until you finish the pasta and bread crumbs.

Open the spaghetti and take out a small handful. Break the noodles in half and then break each half in half again (so that each handful ends up in fourths).

Once the water boils, add a small handful of salt to the water and dump the pasta in. Cook according to the directions on the box.

While the pasta cooks, pour a cup of breadcrumbs into a bowl, season with the rest of the herb de provence, salt, and pepper.

In a small skillet, melt one tablespoon of butter over low heat. Add the reserved garlic and let it saute for a minute. Add the breadcrumbs and stir to combine. Toast for 5 minutes or until crispy and golden.

Once the pasta is done, drain it and return it to the warm pot. Dish up some pasta in a bowl. Add a ladle or two of the braised eggplant and top with the breadcrumbs.

Enjoy!

*Yes, I at one point subscribed to Yankee magazine. I was in New England and I was hoping to learn about fun things to do and see. They had New England style recipes, which were informative, although New England is not exactly known for its stellar cuisine. Yes, Scott is sufficiently ashamed of me.

Farmer's Market Creation: Stewed Heirloom Tomatoes and Okra Over Brown Rice

I'm introducing a new feature here at A Professor's Kitchen called Farmer's Market Creations.

Living in New England meant I could find local fresh produce any old time I wanted -- it's kind of their thing. There are plenty of other places that haven't rabidly embraced the local/organic/sustainable trifecta, Lake Charles being one of them. Never fear! Charlestown is here! Every Saturday from 8 until noon, there's a farmer's market on Ryan Street right across from the old city hall.

Farmer's Market Creations are inspired by my favorite challenge:
1.) Go to your local farmer's market.
2.) See what looks good.
3.) Come up with a dish using what looks good.

So, this dish is made from the things that looked good at the farmer's market and the stuff I already had in my pantry.

Farmer's Market Ingredients:

First up, heirloom tomatoes

So magical

Nothing tastes like a real tomato. The things you find in the grocery store just can't match it. These had unbelievable flavor.

The other thing I couldn't resist was some great-looking fresh okra, which I neglected to take a photo of by itself. It was pre-sliced and had a mild, fresh flavor.

So, what does a good Southern girl make with tomatoes and okra? Yeah, you know what's up.

Notes: Remember that brown rice (a) takes more liquid than regular rice and (b) takes much longer than regular rice. Give yourself 45 minutes for the rice to cook. Luckily, you can simmer the okra and tomatoes while the rice cooks. Once the 45 minutes is up, you'll still see liquid in the pot. Never fear, it's cooked. Brown rice is just wetter than white rice.

Since I had lots of time, I decided to try to caramelize the onions. I'm not very good at this: I either burn them or I don't get them brown enough. This try was no exception; they weren't as caramelized as I would have liked, but they were still good.

You may need to add a little water to the pan once you put in the tomatoes, okra, and beans. It depends on how juicy your tomatoes are. If it looks too dry, add just a little water to start with. Once you put the lid on and start simmering, the veggies will produce their own delicious juices.

Ingredients:

For rice:
2 1/4 cups of stock (I used chicken stock)
1 cup brown rice (plain, not quick-cooking)
2 tablespoons of butter

For tomato and okra mixture:
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon of butter
4 heirloom tomatoes, diced
2 cups sliced okra
2 tablespoons of fresh thyme leaves, chopped
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 15 oz. can of cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
10 drops Tabasco
1 capful of liquid smoke
Salt
Pepper

Start by cooking the rice. Add butter to a 2-quart sauce pan and let it melt. Add rice and toast until it smells nutty or about 2 minutes. Pour in the stock, give it a stir, and bring everything to a simmer. Put the lid on and simmer for 45 minutes.

While the rice cooks, prep the other ingredients.

Melt the butter in a sauce pan and sweat the onions over medium-low heat for 20 minutes until tender and golden brown. Add garlic, tomatoes, okra, beans, thyme, liquid smoke, and Tabasco. Season the onions with salt and pepper, then season the entire mixture with salt and pepper. Simmer the mixture for another 20 minutes. By that time, your rice should be almost done.

Spoon some rice into a serving bowl and ladle the tomato and okra mixture over the rice. Enjoy!