Eggplant

Look for precooked polenta logs in the refrigerated section of your grocery store. If using fresh plum tomatoes, peel them by scoring an X in the bottom with a paring knife and plunging them into boiling water for several seconds; transfer to an ice-water bath, and let cool. Slip off and discard the peels and seeds.

Moussaka may be assembled 1 day in advance and refrigerated; bake for an additional 15 to 20 minutes, or until the center is hot.

This is an excellent accompaniment to meat or fish; it can also be served as an entrée.

Mild yet rich tasting, this easy-to-make dish gets a lot of Mediterranean flavor from the Greek seasoning blend and mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses.

Creamy, cheesy polenta tops a chunky mixture of vegetables in this hearty casserole.

Caponata is a classic appetizer spread that has the sweet and sour balanced components of many Mediterranean dishes. Here, the eggplant, red pepper, and onions are cooked in the wood-fired oven before being combined with salty capers and toasted pine nuts. It can be added to a pasta salad or used as the filling in an omelet or frittata.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe my friend Deborah Madison shared in her book, Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen. It is absolutely gorgeous! Purple eggplant, red peppers, and golden saffron custard are a beautiful combination. Eggplant and red peppers are the perfect ingredients to cook in a wood-fired oven, as they both take on the wonderful smokiness of the fire. In this recipe, the eggplant is lightly sautéed in a skillet in the oven. The red peppers, tomatoes, and garlic are roasted whole, directly on the floor of the oven or in the embers, until the skins are blistered and beautifully charred. When cooled, they are skinned and seeded. Peppers roasted this way have a more complex flavor than when blackened on the stove top.

This is not your basic antipasti. Serving a beautiful platter of wood-roasted seasonal vegetables, cured meats, hand-crafted cheeses, home-cured olives, and smoke-kissed crusty bread to family and friends as a prelude to dinner is an artful way to honor guests. This is just what chef Chris Bianco does at his restaurant, Pizzeria Bianco, in Phoenix, Arizona. Chris’s wood-fired pizzas are now legendary, but his wood-roasted antipasti platter sings. I hope you will enjoy my version, and create many versions of your own.

These stuffed flatbreads are shaped much like meat-filled galettes. Lamb is the meat of choice in many Mediterranean cuisines, and here it is combined with other key ingredients of the region—eggplant and pomegranate—along with the warm aromatics often used in Turkish cuisine.

R. B.’s childhood campout hobo packet memories have inspired many of our favorite side dishes. He’s put just about every vegetable combo imaginable in a foil packet on the grill. Without added water, vegetables steam in their own juices and roast beautifully over the direct high heat of the grill. Even better and easier than the grill is the even heat of a hot oven. If there were a hobo packet merit badge, R. B. would have definitely earned it.

Have we cheesed you out? Take a cheese break and try this straight vegetable-bean puree with nutty sweet garlic and smoked paprika. It may not be the lead-off dish to a night of Crock Dogs, but it fashionably introduces dressier barbecue dinners. We especially like it with Tandoori BBQ Chicken Thighs (page 96), Cider-Soy Pork Tenderloin (page 79), House Lamb Shanks (page 128), and Ultimate Cheater Oven-Smoked Salmon (page 132).

It is neither a purply, sugared mass nor cold and puckery pap, the true caponata, but a baronial dish first fashioned by the great monzù—dialect for monsieur—the title given to the French chefs imported by the nobility during the reign of the Bourbons. Borrowing from a dish left by the Arabs and tinkered with by the Spanish, the monzù exalted the simple braise of eggplant and tomatoes, building a set piece of it, spicing its sauce with oranges and cloves and even a whisper of cacao, then bejeweling it with roasted lobsters and prawns. I thought it, alas, only an historical dish. But with some supplication of a Palermitano friend, ricette antiche—ancient recipes—were unriddled and, after days of bombast and wrangling discourse, one cook was fixed upon who might still build The True Caponata. Two evenings later, I was indulged. The dish is a beauty even if one wishes not to garnish it with the roasted seafood. Then, one calls it la caponatina. Stuffed inside the belly of a whole fish—a sea bass, a salmon, a cod—and wood-roasted, it is splendid.

A gastronomic heirloom of the coast, this is a humble recipe made from the bits and pieces of what was at hand, sometimes eaten as a principal dish or a contorno, a side dish, other times as a sweet. It is still presented— though in dramatically different versions—in cherished places such as Da Gemma in Amalfi. This take, however, is lighter, less vegetal than most of those with which we’ve been presented, the trick being the absolute thinness of the eggplant slices. This enables them to blend better with the other components, all of them then settling down together into a nicely married sort of flavor and texture. More eccentric than it is bizarre, this version of the ancestral dish turns out to be quite luscious.

This dish was inspired by a trip to Tunisia a few years ago. I fell in love with the Tunisian cooks’ use of spices and the bowls of harissa served with every meal. What surprised me most was the use of caraway, which I had always thought of as an Eastern European spice. For this Tunisian-flavored stew, I season the lamb shoulder overnight with caraway, coriander, chiles, cayenne, and paprika, and then braise it in an aromatic broth with cinnamon and allspice. For a traditional braise I usually deglaze with wine, but in keeping with Muslim prohibitions common in Tunisia, I refrain and substitute lemon juice, which also adds a bright, acidic note to the stew.

Part of what makes these marinated peppers and eggplant so delicious is the involved process they go through to get to their seemingly simple final state. In her book, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, Judy Rodgers suggests that the chef’s eternal quest is to make the simplest process more difficult: “Stop, think, there must be a harder way,” she writes. There are easier ways to make peppers and eggplant, but once you taste this version, it’s hard to go back. If you like, make them the day before and let the vegetables marinate overnight.

These skewers of sea bass are seasoned with a North African condiment called charmoula and served over marinated eggplant and peppers. Charmoula, like so many Old World recipes, has as many versions as there are cooks. Although the proportions and some ingredients vary, everyone seems to agree that charmoula must have cilantro, garlic, cumin, and paprika and then be finished with olive oil and vinegar. One Sunday when we were working on this dish, Julie Robles, then sous-chef at Lucques, suggested adding rice wine vinegar to our charmoula experiment. It’s certainly not authentic, but we both liked the milder, sweeter nuance it gave the sauce. In fact, the charmoula was so good we decided to use it twice. First we marinated the fish in the spicy condiment (acid-free, so it wouldn’t “cook” the fish), and then, as we pulled the kabobs from the grill, we slathered them once again in charmoula.

At the height of summer, I’m always thinking of new ways to combine farmer’s market vegetables. Eggplants and peppers are a natural pair, and I like to highlight their different textures here. I roast the eggplants until they almost collapse, but quick-char the peppers to keep their crunch while giving them a smoky flavor. Perfectly seared scallops tie the two textures and flavors together.