Gypsy Kitchens: A Mediterranean Crustacean Feast

Without our car and our well-stocked travel kitchen, we've had to work with whatever comes with a rental apartment. This can range from a microwave to a full stove and oven set. It almost always includes dull knives, which is why a light weight knife sharpener just may be the best investment for a traveler who plans on self catering. Sometimes, a kitchen's limitations can be frustrating. Other times, it can lead you in a direction you may not have gone. Our apartment in Valletta had a few badly scratched up non-stick pans and a bottle of corn oil. It also had a big ole pot. A pot so large that it could be best described as, you guessed it, a lobster pot. And with a name like that, who are we to use it for anything but?
Shellfish is just about the easiest thing you can cook, especially if you haven't yet invested in butter, olive oil, salt or pepper and have a broken plastic spatula to work with. Sure, cracking lobster open might pose its own challenges, but that's one of life's more pleasurable battles. Ever heard of the old lady who lifts a car to save a baby? Where there's a will. Curiosity and indecisiveness are traits that we, as a couple, carry with us on any market visit. So, our supper became a study in Mediterranean crustaceans. Our dinner was upgraded to a feast.
Also to blame (or credit) is the Marsaxlokk fish market's abundance and variety. Here is the man we purchased our crustaceans from. The shallow pan in front of his gutting slab is where the lobsters sat. You can see the big pile of langoustines and few scattered red prawns. With everything local and freshly caught, the sizes were far from uniform and the numbers varied. Our order went something like this: one ugly lobster, one pretty one, two shrimps with those long arms, yeah, those and ummm four of these red ones. He handed them off to his wife who weighed them and people crowded around to get their turn. He was the most popular monger of the bunch.
We have eaten a lot of shellfish in our day and, still, the field of crustacean identification remains a mystery. We just go with what looks interesting. What we thought were crimson shrimp are actually red prawns, and there is a difference. The paler "shrimp" with the long arms are actually lobsters, called "langoustines," "Dublin prawns" or "Norway lobsters." They are considered by some to be the single most important commercial crustacean in Europe. They would be the only true lobsters put in our pot.
The, left, spiny lobster and, right, slipper lobster are not true lobsters since they do not have claws. In the crustacean world, these two are each others closest relative - which would be why they were snatched from the same bay. From the top, side, underside, they couldn't have looked or acted more dissimilar. The pretty spiny tried to crawl away from us at every chance and the big, oafish slipper only really acted out when we went to uncurl its tail. THWACK! It curled back violently and forcefully - it is what the slippers use to move across the ocean floor and all. Still, it was incredible to feel its tail strength.
The beautiful spiny is considered a delicacy, able to appear on a plate in all its attractive. Its torso is spiky and furry, but the rest of it is a smooth, vibrant purple and orange pattern. The tail was as gorgeous as tortoise shell. The slipper is furry all over and brown. A combination which winds up resembling a kiwi. As you can see, it is almost all tail. So, its meat is what you are usually getting when eating lobster bisque or buying frozen lobster tail chunks from Trader Joe's. In the "lobster" world, the slipper is kind of the fat opera singer who is used to dub over the tone deaf starlet. Those plates on its head are actually its antennae.
After a day of exploring, we came home to free our lobsters from their refrigerator prison. A bittersweet freedom. They had been lulled to sleep by the cold and we worried about their livelihood. The more lively lobsters are, the healthier. The healthier, the meatier. Have you ever opened a lobster and found that there was less meat inside than you were expecting? It was probably kept in a tank too long. When a lobster is kept out of its natural environment its flesh begins to shrink. Anyway, it was sorta sad but also encouraging that the spiny began to climb on slipper's back to escape. We had to thwart their mission, but it was good to see they still had some healthy fire in them.
We were curious to see how all our little guys would look after their steam bath. The slipper needed a little makeover and we were delighted to see that it turned that wonderful lobster red that makes you want to dig in. The spiny lobster lost its beautiful purple color, but kept some of its orange flecks. The prawns' hue became a little subdued, less blood red, more brick red and the almost translucent orange-y langoustines' bodies turned pastel pink and its claws, red and white. With all the red lobsters before us, we got to missing our homeland variety. Call us Yankees, but there's just nothing like an Atlantic lobster. We're Team Claw in the great Claw vs Tail debate, after all.
However, you can't really argue with this plate of food. Indulgent but healthy. Decadent but simple. Having them side by side really brought out the subtle differences in each meat. The langoustine had the delicate almost watery taste and consistency of crab legs. The prawns were dense, snappy and sweet. The slipper lobster's tail was so chewy, meaty and substantial that we actually wound up pulling it apart and laying it on a piece of buttered toast to savor it longer and do better justice to its thick, tasty one note. The spiny lobster's tail was stringier and sweeter. The skirt steak to the slipper's flank. They may not be "true" lobsters, but they sure tasted like lobster. Our meal was beyond delicious and actually educational. What more can you ask for?

Note: As you can see from the first photo, those branded wet naps accumulated throughout our time in Turkey really came in handy.

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Gypsy Kitchens: Cooking Kolokasi

Cyprus has snow. Even now, in March, people are skiing in the high Troodos. Installed in the small mountain hamlet of Silikou, our breath has been white in the evenings and we have our drinks by a blazing hearth. The cold and altitude have brought our thoughts back to hearty winter-roots and warm food. So, on a rainy day in our stone cottage, we decided to cook up a Kolokasi stew, a filling and simple Cypriot specialty. One thing that worried us: Kolokasi is poisonous.
Kolokasi is a bit of a mystery food. Better known in English as taro (or dasheen), it's extremely rare in Europe - most Taro is cultivated in southeast Asia and Malaysia, where it originated. The course roots were once popular in the Roman empire, after being introduced by way of Egypt, but as Rome declined, so too did Kolokasi. Now, it's only grown in significant quantities in two places on the European continent: the geek island of Ikaria and in Cyprus.

The first time we saw Kolokasi for sale, we actually thought they were some kind of huge mushroom.
High levels of calcium oxalate in taro give the root its toxicity, and make it inedible when raw. There are a few ways to minimize the poisonous effects - soaking the roots in cold water for 24 hours, for example. But nobody would want to eat kolokasi raw anyway, and the best way to get rid of the poison is to thoroughly cook it - just like rhubarb. Some people suggest cooking it with baking soda, but we made a mistake and added baking powder. Not that it mattered. We're still alive.
We bought our kolokasi from a man who sold them on the roadside. He had two varieties - one larger type and these small ones. It wasn't clear what the difference between them was. He was also keen on selling us potatoes instead, maybe because they're not poisonous. Declining the potatoes, we picked up a few carrots and onions.
The cooking process wasn't too difficult, just the basic peel, chop and boil technique. The skin was tough and covered with small hairs. Slime formed on the white flesh as it was cut - a kind of milky, white, slippery stuff that got all over the cutting board and our hands. It's supposedly possible to minimize this sliminess by breaking the kolokasi apart with your hands, but you'd have to be incredibly strong. The roots are denser than potatoes, and hard to get a grip on. Plus, the peel is too unappetizing to leave on.
Though it's been common on the Cyprus roadsides, supermarkets and vegetable stands, we hadn't knowingly eaten any taro on the island. So this isn't really a recipe, it's more of an experiment - the goal was to see if we could cook the kolokasi, eat it and survive. We added garlic and tomato paste to our liquid, but otherwise kept it simple - we were curious about how this stuff tasted, and didn't want to muddy up the flavor.
It took about an hour and a half of cooking to make the cubes fork-tender. Interestingly, the crisp edges of the cut kolokasi dissolved as we boiled it, and the whole stew turned into an orange, chunky mash, which isn't so bad on a cold night in the mountains.

A more traditional Cypriot recipe involves making a kind of soup with pork and celery, which makes sense. It would be a great thickening agent in place of more traditional stew roots, adding starch to the broth while remaining somewhat whole.
So, how did it taste? Pretty bland. The flavor is somewhere between that of potato, yucca and plantain. It wasn't much different than any other root vegetable slurry - except for the nervousness about getting sick. For a few hours after eating, we paid careful attention to our stomachs, watching for some sign (who knows what) of low grade kolokasi poisoning. It wasn't until the next morning, really, that we were completely convinced that we'd made it through okay. Maybe baking powder helps too.

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Gypsy Kitchens: Citrus Season

As we already mentioned, it's citrus season here in Cyprus. Groves cover large stretches of the landscape and are heavy with fruit. Lemons, grapefruits, and especially oranges are impossible to escape. And why try? Costas, our host at Asty Hotel in Nicosia, insisted we take as many oranges from the breakfast room as we could. "I just bought 10 kilos this morning!" he said, inspecting our pickings and deciding they were too slim. Our rental in Agios Athanasios came with a stocked fruit bowl. If we ran out, there was always the daily citrus vendor. Clementines were set out in wicker baskets at outdoor tables in Girne, the healthiest bar snack we'd ever seen.
At first, we kept pace. Two juiced oranges with breakfast, two more for lunch, one in the evening. They are incredibly thick-skinned, which initially fooled us into thinking they were under-ripe. Each orange, once peeled, is about a third of the size it appeared. But, just like great shellfish, any thought about "so much work for so little return" is immediately dashed once the flesh hits your mouth. We have never had oranges like this before. And the mandarins - divine.
Soon, we had to actually buy our own oranges. All of our lovely hand-outs consumed. As soon as the thought came to mind, we only had to look five feet in any direction to find the nearest citrus vendor. With such an abundance absolutely everywhere, it's impossible to buy less than a bundle. The fruit was warm to the touch, sun-soaked, as we placed one after another in our bag. The vendor looked at the amount, gave us a price and then threw a few more in for good measure.
As anyone who has ever gone apple picking knows, there is such a thing as too much of a good fruit. Looking for ways to use all of our perfect Cypriot oranges we created three easy salads, using other ingredients that have been popping up on plates and market stands all around us: beets, chickpeas, local cheese and anchovies. Each salad is designed to utilize one of the orange's great qualities, its sweetness, its sourness and its juiciness.
The first salad is the most traditional, meaning that its base is a leafy green. Complimenting the orange's sweetness, we paired it with bitter rucola, spicy red onion and salty anchovies. Canned fish is a Gypsy Kitchen favorite not just because they keep so well, but because we don't always have a bottle of olive oil available. Use anchovies packed in oil so that you can just drizzle the liquid out of the can right onto your salad. The orange slices provide the acid needed to make it perfectly dressed.
The second salad brings out the orange's tartness and sourness. It's difficult for anything to taste super sweet when put up against a beet. We advise against canned beets, but those pre-cooked whole beets in plastic found in some produce aisles work well if you don't want to cook them yourself. To ground those two vibrant flavors, add cubes of semi-hard mild cheese - cubed so that it will be a third in the trio of ingredients as opposed to glomming on to the other two. We used local dry anari, made from a blend of sheep, cow and goat's milk. Mozzarella would work as well. As would brebis. If you use feta, don't add any extra salt. In Cyprus, parsley is ubiquitous and it's easy to find a big, fresh bunch at any store. As in the other salad, we added red onion, dicing it for some crunch. Dress with olive oil, a little balsamic vinegar and salt.
The third salad plays off of the orange's juiciness. We've been eating a lot of humus in Cyprus so chickpeas seemed only natural. They make a wonderful salad ingredient, but can be a little starchy, even dry. In come the oranges, along with a good amount of parsley to add a little flatness to all the round flavors. We added a little olive oil, red onion and some chili powder, which goes very well with both chickpeas and orange and injects a little Turkish-Cypriot flavor.
The easiest way to add orange to a salad is to cut it into slices, unpeeled. Cut a slit into each slice, unlatching the ring, and pull straight so that the little triangle of orange stick up like teeth from the peel. It's really easy to catch and remove seeds this way and the fruit is easier to work with. Just pull each piece off (working over your salad so that any discarded juice doesn't go to waste). Smaller pieces will mix into your salad more evenly.
Three pieces of fruit remain. If we had the means, we would attempt preserving them, like lemons, as they were served to us a few nights ago at Skourouvinnos Tavern. Chances are, they will be mixed into some sheep yogurt at breakfast tomorrow. And, then, we'll just have to buy some more. Because we can't help ourselves. 'Tis the season.

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Gypsy Kitchens: The Durrell

English writer Lawrence Durrell lived in Cyprus for about three years in the 1950s and remains one if its most talked about residents. It's no surprise, being as Durrell told the world about his time here in a memoir called Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. We'd never heard of it, nor had we heard of him until we began to research the country. His name came up as often and with as much assumed interest as Van Gogh's in Provence. The home he lived in, the school he taught at, the hotel he listed as "the best in town," are all considered historic sights. In his home village of Bellapais, two trees contend for the title of "The Tree of Idleness," an important landmark in Bitter Lemons. The fact that he found Limassol "unsightly" comes up in Lonely Planet's history of the city. In Limassol, we bought the book and created a cocktail in his honor. That way we'd be able to curl up with them both.
The man at the used bookshop told us "not to believe everything - it is just Lawrence's opinion." We doubt this came only from his distaste for Limassol. Three chapters in, he has happily drank Commandaria with Greek-Cypriot friends and Coca Cola with Turkish-Cypriot friends. His life was a blissful convergence of the two cultures that would divide the country in a clash. Durrell left Cyprus after the "enosis" based EOKA resistance movement really heated up. This was the desire of Greek-Cypriots to break from England and become part of Greece. As Lawrence was a Brit, I'm sure his take on the events of 1955 don't mesh with the old book seller's. We're enjoying Bitter Lemons and enjoying The Durrell cocktail even more.
Obviously, we began with Schweppe's Bitter Lemon. Any American traveling to Western Europe will come home with tales of the stuff. A friend of ours shipped a case of it to themselves, not wanting to have to quit cold turkey after two weeks of drinking it in Portugal. Usually, candies and drinks that are going for "lemon" go more for the sweet and sour aspects of its flesh. This leaves you thinking more about its peel. It tastes like a very bitter tonic water, very zesty. Obviously, Bitter Lemon goes well with gin, but we wanted to keep things more local. Ouzo, ours made by the Cypriot company KEO, is the Greek version of France's Pastis or Turkey's Raki - an anise aperitif that turns cloudy when you add water. The third ingredient is, you guessed it, bitters. A local Limassol company, Magousta, has been making "Magic Drops" since the 1930s. However, it was originally called "Cock Drops," a fact made more unfortunate by the label's recommendation to "snip the top" of your Cock Drops bottle to have it dispense correctly. Last ingredient, lemon.
It's citrus season here in Cyprus. The oranges, clementines and mandarins are being harvested. The grapefruit is almost ready and the lemon trees are bare from earlier collection. Lemons in Cyprus are big and sweet. And abundant. Most houses have at least one lemon tree, every meze dinner comes with a plate full of wedges. Greek Cypriot recipes feature lemon prominently, so our Greek Cypriot cocktail does, too. We only needed a quarter of a lemon for each glass because the wedges were incredibly juicy.
You never really know when conceptualizing a cocktail, but somehow we created a truly delicious drink. The Durrell's ingredients go so well together that we now mix one up any evening we have available ice. The ouzo, on its own, is sweet and heavy. Adding the biting, carbonated Bitter Lemon really balances that out. A drop of bitters adds a little complexity, like a single bay leaf does in a big pot of soup. Since Magousta's Magic Drops is bright red, this tints The Durrell pink. Ole Lawrence is a little flushed. A good squeeze of lemon and you've got the final note: fresh, vibrant citrus. Now, go ahead and pick up a guide book about Cyprus. Every time Lawrence Durrell or Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is mentioned, take a sip of The Durrell. We assure you it will be a very educational and dangerous drinking game. Here's the recipe. Serve on the rocks.

2 parts Ouzo
1 part Schweppe's Bitter Lemon
A drop of bitters
1 - 2 quarters lemon, depending on juiciness
Ice 

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Gypsy Kitchens: Mercimek Çorbasi

The first time we had Turkish lentil soup, we didn’t know what it was. It certainly didn’t resemble any kind of lentil soup we were used to. Spicy, smooth and vegetal, this was something familiar that also tasted emphatically like Turkey.

Mercimek çorbasi is served at the beginning of most Turkish meals (it seems), and comes in a variety of different forms. The notable components are red lentils, cumin, red pepper flakes and dried mint. Here’s a recipe that’s really easy, but takes a little while – chicken stock isn’t easy to find in this part of the world, so we did this the old fashioned way.

Much easier to find: spices. At the spice bazaar, one can find all sorts of strange tastes and powders. The air inside – a heady mix of scents – seems to have absorbed some essence of centuries of caravans. It’s actually flavored, it’s so dense and exotic.

Mercimek çorbasi begins with cumin and pepper, the two princes of the bazaar. We added them to the pot first – dry spice in the bottom of a dry pot. Heated for a few minutes, they get fragrant, their richness emerges. Use as much as you feel comfortable with. The amount will depend on how hot your pepper is, of course, and how much spice you like in a soup. We’d say a base amount should be four or five tablespoons. It should be said that these red pepper flakes aren’t chili powder.

After you can really smell the cumin and pepper, add an unhealthy pour of olive oil and some bony scraps of raw chicken (it’s surprising how hard it is to find stock parts in the US, and how easy it is to find them overseas). Cook for a few minutes on high heat, adding a chopped onion, a few cloves of crushed garlic and about two carrots, finely cubed.
When the onion has softened up and the chicken's begun to brown, incorporate about three tablespoons of dried mint, then pour in enough water to semi-fill the pot. As it’s coming to a boil, chop parsley and stem thyme, adding them as you go. Boil the water, reduce to a simmer and then leave it for a few hours or all day. We also put in fresh mint, though this isn’t quite as traditional.

About an hour before you’re ready to eat, remove the boiled chicken bits and check your water level (add more if you don’t have enough). Peel and chop two tomatoes and throw them into the stock along with a squeeze of tomato paste (we’re hesitant to suggest an amount because tomato pastes vary so much – salt levels are especially important, so it’s best to taste the paste yourself and then decide how much to use). Salt to taste.

If you’ve added additional water, bring the stock to a boil again, then add both a cup of lentils and three-quarters of a cup of bulgur for every estimated gallon of liquid you have. Simmer slowly for about forty five minutes, stirring occasionally. When the lentils are really tender, turn the heat off and let the soup sit for a few minutes before serving. Usually, this soup is served blended – but we didn’t have a blender.

This is a delicious soup for cool weather, and is even better with a dollop of thick yogurt mixed with mint. Not surprisingly, most of these ingredients are also part of our last recipe, for imam biyaldi – we can personally attest that the two dishes go well together.

Making mercimek çorbasi with store-bought stock is about the easiest thing you could do. Just don’t add the chicken and cut down the amount of garlic and onion. The whole process should take only about an hour.

One more note – you should only use red lentils for this recipe – and make sure to pick through them for stones and rinse them well before cooking.

Here’s the recipe!

Mercimek çorbasi

Ingredients:

- 4 tablespoons Turkish red pepper flakes, easily replaced by almost any red pepper flakes

- 2 tablespoons cumin (not curry)

- 3 tablespoons dried mint

- 2 tablespoons fresh thyme

- Half-handful fresh parsley, chopped

- About 10 leaves fresh mint, chopped

- 2 carrots, cubed

- 1 onion, chopped

- 4 cloves garlic, crushed

- 2 tomatoes, peeled and chopped

- 1 or 1 ½ pounds bony chicken, raw

- 1 ½ cups red lentils (maybe more, if there’s a lot of stock)

- 1 cup bulgur

- Olive oil

- Tomato paste, salt and water

Method:

- In a soup pot, heat the cumin and pepper until fragrant, then add oil and chicken. Cook for a minute on high heat, then add onion, garlic and carrot. When the chicken has begun to brown and the onions are soft, add dried mint and fill pot with water.

- Bring water to a boil. As it’s heating, stem and chop the other fresh herbs and add them to the pot. When the water boils, reduce to a good simmer. Cook uncovered for anywhere between two and ten hours.

- Remove the chicken and discard. Try to gauge how much stock you will need for the soup and add water accordingly. Add tomato paste and tomato, taste and add salt. Bring to a boil.

- Rinse and pick through the lentils, then add them to the boiling stock. Add bulgur. Reduce to a hard simmer and cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

- Blend if you want.

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Gypsy Kitchens: Imam Biyaldi

"The priest fainted!" Don't worry, it's just the name of the dish. Imam biyaldi translates literally to this phrase - though, what it really means is braised eggplants stuffed with tomato, onion and garlic. It's the most popular eggplant dish in Turkey, which means that it's one of the most famous dishes in general, as eggplants are a sort of culinary king here. Perhaps it's because religious fasting has historically placed an emphasis on vegetarian dishes that the eggplant is featured as often and with as much variety as it is here. No matter, the imam fainted over this dish and you will, too - both because it is as foolproof as it is delicious. And it is very, very delicious.
The ingredients are simple and classically Turkish: small eggplants, tomato, red chili flakes (which are present on every table top beside the salt and pepper shakers), onion, garlic, thyme and a whole lot of parsley. And olive oil. Explanations for why the priest actually fainted tend to be along the lines of "he found out how much olive oil was used in the dish" or "after asking his wife to make it four days in a row, he discovered their entire stock of olive oil was finished." Most morbid is a theory that it was the fatty oil itself that just knocked the poor man out. The truth is that there's actually no need for an excessive amount in your preparation. We were all set with a full, new bottle and wound up using about a quarter cup in all.
"Stuffed" is a little bit of a loose term. The eggplant isn't scooped out to make room for the filling. Simply split your eggplant in half and cut a slit down the middle of each half. This way, all of the great flavors you'll be piling on top can seep in a little more. If the eggplants you've bought are too round to sit flat and work with, go ahead and cut a slice out of the bottom, flattening its bulbous side.
Something we've noticed a lot here is the skinning of tomatoes. This dish calls for exactly that. Remove the skin, slice and discard the seeds and liquid. Since tomato is going to be the bulk of your filling, one small fruit per half of a small eggplant should work well. Heat up a healthy dose of olive oil in a deep pan or shallow pot (something with a lid) and soften chopped yellow onion and minced garlic. When they're done, add them to your sliced tomatoes. This is the base of your mix. In goes as much chopped, fresh parsley as you can stand, lemon juice, a pinch of fresh thyme (de-stemmed), salt and red pepper flakes. The spicier the better.
After combining the ingredients, strain the mixture. The most efficient way of doing this is to initially mix it up in a colander set in a bowl. Then, you can simply lift the colander, shake and drain the excess liquid out. We decided to separate the juices in order to uses them in the braising later. This way, you don't lose an ounce of the flavor you're working with. Speaking of utilizing every last drop...
That pan you sauteed the onions and garlic in should still be nice and oily. Rub your eggplant halves face down to give them a coating of olive oil. Then, flip them over and fit them snugly, side by side, in the pan. - flat side up. Spoon your mixture on top. Having the eggplant all lined up makes an even smothering simple. When you're all "filled" up, pour the liquid you set aside down into the bottom of the pan, along with about a cup of water. Bring to a simmer, cover and lower heat. After an hour, uncover and cook some more. The eggplant will already be meltingly soft, but it's nice to try to cook off as much remaining liquid as possible. We wound up spooning some out and then cooking for ten minutes "dry." A thin coating of nice brown molasses had formed at the bottom of the pan.
Half of the eggplant dishes we've had in Turkey have come smothered in yogurt. The two flavors work so well together. We decided that the perfect "cooling agent" for our spicy imam biyaldi would be a mint yogurt. All we did was chop up fresh mint and mix it into plain yogurt, resisting the urge to salt. Our first helping of eggplant was served warm, and the cold yogurt melted beautifully onto it. Our second was, more traditionally, served cold. The yogurt was a vibrant new layer on the chilled dish. Either way, it was an ideal complement. Not to be skipped.
The flesh of the eggplant was so tender and pillowy that it made us wonder if that's why the imam really fainted. Here's the recipe. Ingredients aren't measured out because a lot of it should be chosen by personal preference. That's part of the fun and ease of this amazing dish!

Imam Bayildi

Ingredients:

small eggplants (a lot less seedy than their bigger relatives)

small tomatoes (one for each half you are making)

garlic

yellow onion

fresh parsley (a healthy bunch)

fresh thyme

red pepper flakes

lemon (or unsweetened lemon juice)

water

fresh mint

plain yogurt (milk, sheep or goat - just not flavored)

Process:

- remove stems and halve your small eggplants. cut a slit down the flat side of each half.

- peel, slice and remove seeds from your tomatoes. place in a colander, set in a bowl, and add lemon juice, chopped parsley, red pepper flakes, fresh thyme and salt.
-soften your chopped yellow onion and minced garlic in olive oil. add these to your mixture. combine and strain, but lifting and shaking colander over the bowl.
-set aside liquid.
-rub the flat side of your eggplant on the bottom of your oil-coated pan (previously used for onion and garlic), then place them skin side down, snugly side by side.
-spoon filling over the lined up eggplant.
-add about a cup of water to your liquid and pour into the bottom of your pan.
-bring to simmer, cover, lower heat and cook gently for one hour.
-uncover and cook for a half hour more. at about the halfway mark, spoon out any excess liquid. a thin brown coating should form at the bottom of your pan. you're done!

- Serve cold or hot, but definitely with a mixture of yogurt and chopped mint spooned on top.

It's next to impossible to over or under cook your imam biyaldi. So, just relax and enjoy!


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Gypsy Kitchens: Moules à la Bretonne

We cook mussels a lot because they are so simple, cheap and delicious. There may not be another dish that is this easy and feels as luxurious. On the northern coast of Brittany - Breton in Gallic, Bretagne in French - camping near the chilly, autumnal Atlantic, it finally seemed like the right time to do a Gypsy Kitchens post about this standby. We dressed them up a little, giving this version a regional twist and a more substantial broth (heartier, one might say, to get us through a cool night in the tent). Here, then, is our cider and white-bean recipe for mussels, what we are calling "Moules à la Bretonne."
Of course, Mussels don't require a recipe at all. Often, there is nothing worth doing to them except adding a little wine and garlic, steaming and serving. The idea, here, was to focus on the broth. This region, along with Normandy, is famous for its apples and ciders, and it seemed appropriate to use a local tipple in place of the typical white wine or vermouth. It should be noted that this is a hard cider, and a dry one at that. One could use a sweet, fresh cider, but it might be a little overwhelming. To make everything even more fun, we chopped up some ginger to accompany the shallot and garlic in the base.
Using a good dose of olive oil or butter, soften a finely-chopped shallot or yellow onion (or two shallots, or even a few leeks) in a pot that's large enough for all of the shells. Cook the well-minced ginger with the onion - use as much as seems right to you, anywhere from a tablespoon to several - and notice one of the best smells in cooking as the two roots mingle and become aromatic. Add the garlic when the onions are just on the verge of browning, cook a few seconds more, then add the white beans. Because we're on a campsite, the beans came from a can. Warm up the beans, then add the mussels, some cider and cover the pot.
Backing up a moment here, it might be worth mentioning that picking through your shellfish beforehand is always a good idea. Discard any badly broken mussels and any that are wide open. If the shell is open a little, and stays closed when you squeeze it, it's likely fine. Also, pull out any bits of detritus stuck in the cracks, and - if you can bare one more step - give the guys a good rinse in cold water before cooking. We probably don't have to tell anyone not to eat any mussels that haven't opened when they're cooked, or any that smell foul. One more note - there is a lot of salt in most shellfish, so adding more is never necessary, no matter how much you want to.
Cook the mussels for about twelve minutes, keeping the pot covered the entire time. If the shells haven't opened after twelve minutes, cook them for another three or four minutes. Then - and this sounds silly, but it's true - you're done. Just put the mussels in bowls, ladle some of the broth over the top and eat.
The broth was actually even better than we'd hoped. As the breeze got cooler and more blustery, we huddled at the picnic table, eating bowl after bowl. The local mussels were delicious and tender. The slight sweetness of the cider counteracted the brine in the broth to perfection, and the beans gave the juice a nice focal point.

A funny thing about mussels - they always fill you up more than expected. After finishing the dishes (there weren't many to do), we got into the tent feeling stuffed. Listening to the sea and the wind outside we talked about how satisfyingly maritime the evening had been.

Here's the recipe, as laughably easy as it is...

Moules à la Bretonne

Ingredients:

3 to 4 pounds mussels, cleaned well and bought fresh

1 can white beans, rinsed

2 shallots, minced

3 tablespoons ginger, finely minced

2 cloves garlic, smashed and minced

2 to 3 cups dry, alcoholic cider

Olive oil or butter

The Process:

- Clean and rinse the mussels, discarding any broken or wide open specimens.

- In a pot that is at least 1 and 1/3 the size of all the mussels (to account for the shells opening and expanding, which they will), lightly saute the shallots and ginger until the shallots have softened, but not browned.

- Add the garlic and cook for a few moments. Pour in the beans and cook until warmed through, about two minutes.

- Add the mussels and the cider and cover tightly. Turn the heat up to medium high, lowering if the pot begins to boil over.

- Cook 12 minutes, or until most of the shells have opened. Remove from the heat and serve as immediately as possible.