Baba Ganoush

There are so many different recipes for this out there, and mine's a composite of a lot of these.  It's a lighter version than many, but you can make this as fattening as you wish by loading up on the tahini.

2 lbs eggplant

2 or 3 cloves of garlic

1 teaspoon salt

juice of two lemons

1 small bouquet of coriander leaves
2 Tablespoons olive oil

1/3 cup tahini

Set the oven to broil.  Pierce each of the eggplants a few times with a fork and place them alongside the garlic cloves in a large baking dish under the broiler.  Roast until they go soft and the skin is wrinkled and leathery (about 15 minutes).  Remove the garlic cloves if they are soft; otherwise continue roasting.  Turn the eggplants over to roast the other side in the same way.  Your eggplants are ready when they look something like this "after" picture:

Remove the dish from the oven and allow to cool.  In the meantime, wash the coriander if necessary and separate the leaves from the stems.

Squeeze the garlic from their skins into the bowl of the food processor, taking care to remove any burned, hard bits that might have formed around the edges.  Add the lemon juice, olive oil, salt and coriander and blend well.  You should end up with a nice creamy liquid.

Once the eggplants are cool enough to handle, peel off their skins and stems.  Drop them into the food processor and blend thoroughly.  Let the food processor run on high speed for a minute or two to incorporate some air.

Pour the contents of the food processor into a large bowl.  Add the tahini with a spoon, stirring well.

Taste and add more salt if necessary, plus a few grinds of black pepper.  You can also add some ground cumin and coriander, if you like.  The final product is so delicious that I like to just eat it with a spoon.  It's also excellent as a dip for raw vegetables (sticks of celery, carrots, fennel...) or for crackers/pita chips.

Garlic croutons

Here's something to do with bread that loses its freshness (which is sometimes sold at a 50% discount at Your Dekalb Farmer's Market). You can make a bunch of these and store them in the bag/paper wrapper that the bread came in for a few days. They really add a lot to a salad or a soup.

-Slightly hard, three-day old bread
-a generous quantity of olive oil
-2 or 3 garlic cloves

Peel the garlic cloves and slice them lengthwise. Place them in a bowl and crush them with the blunt end of a knife. They don't need to be crushed into a puree or anything, just squished to release their flavor, so you end up with a few small chunks.

Pour a thin layer of olive oil in a large saucepan over medium-low heat. When you can just start to feel the heat rising from the pan with your hand, add the garlic. Watch out: the oil should not be sizzling hot, or else the garlic will burn and get a weird flavor. The idea is to slowly heat the oil to infuse the flavor of the garlic without burning it, so just keep a close watch on your pan. If nothing is happening at all, turn up the heat a bit, but turn it right back down as soon as you hear it sizzling.

After the garlic turns golden and slightly translucent, remove it from the pan. Turn up the heat to medium-high and add the cubes of bread to the pan, gently tossing them around to coat them in oil on all sides. Cook until toasted and crusty.

That's it!