Eggplant You Can Spread on a Pita (a couple of bucks, maybe an hour including pre-baking the eggplant)

This is a recipe I owe to Manjula, sort of -- it's Manjula plus Bombay Cafe minus oil plus a cuisinart (this is exactly the low-rent one I own), which, trust me, makes it all so much easier.

The first thing you need is two medium eggplant, maybe a couple of pounds at the store. Buy the big ones, not the little Asian or Indian ones. When you're buying eggplant, make sure you get unbruised, shiny eggplants whose tops are still a little greenish.

When you get home, stick the eggplants in the oven on 350 and bake them for about half an hour to forty-five minutes. When you poke one with your finger (be quick: they're hot), it should be soft. Set the cookie sheet somewhere to cool. The eggplants should collapse onto themselves entirely.

When you're ready to make the dip, you'll need:

a red or green pepper diced in about half inch squares (roughly a cup)

a cup of frozen peas, set out to thaw

2 cups of crushed/pureed tomatoes

2 tsp ginger, grated

jalapeno mash

1 TBSP oil

two pinches of asafoetida (hing)

2 tsp cumin seeds

2 tsp coriander

1 tsp turmeric

1 tsp red chile powder

2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp garam masala

4 TBSP cilantro

Take the eggplants, now cool, and cut off the top. With your fingers, peel off the skin and discard it. Put the pulp into the cuisinart and process smooth. It should take no time at all. Set aside.

In bowl that pours (I use my large measuring cup), mix tomatoes, ginger, jalapeno, coriander, turmeric, red chile and salt. Set aside.

In a large saucepan, heat oil and lightly saute the diced peppers in the oil. Remove to a bowl, leaving the oil behind. If you don't have much, splash in just a hair more. When it's heated so that a cumin seed cracks when it hits it, add the hing and cumin seeds, stirring and cooking one minute.

Add the tomato mixture and cook 2-3 minutes until a little reduced and you can see the oil separating from the tomatoes.

Add pureed eggplant, stir thoroughly, and cook for 8 minutes.

Add reserved peppers, peas, and cilantro. Cook for one minute to heat the peas through.

Remove from heat, stir in garam masala, and EAT. We spread this on whole wheat tortillas I've toasted in a hot skillet. It's AMAZING.

There you go.

Grits (Geez, I don't know: 50 cents?; about half an hour)

Technically, these are jalapeno cheese grits (milled locally).

And what about those pasty white crap grits you might find at, oh, Waffle House, that were made about 4 in the morning in a huge vat and have been cooking now for about ten hours -- if, by cooking, you mean "sitting over a moderate heat and stirred when one of the toothless but nice waitresses remembers they're there" -- into something resembling plastinated paper pulp that can only be swallowed with lakes, and I mean LAKES, of butter and about six fistfuls of salt -- or, otherwise, have to be stirred onto runny eggs, filled with bacon bits, decorated with cheese, and sopped up with white toast, and then still are less palatable than used TP?

What about them? Pig food, I say. Worse. They should be used for gluing pasta to construction paper in kindergarten classrooms.

Look, Elmer's glue, though edible, is disgusting. Waffle House grits, like the insta-grits you buy at the store, is disgusting. Unless you were starving to death, why would you eat that? It's an act of political solidarity to refuse them, I think, because grits is something the know-nothings north of here hold against us. Grits, they say, snorting. Who would eat something like THAT? Then they sit down to a bowlful of cream of wheat -- or worse, lutefisk on whipped potatoes -- and see no irony at all.

Then they set up companies like Quaker Oats (a division of PepsiCo.! Now you know they're both evil and not from around here) to sell us "instant" grits in little packets, flavored like "artificial butter" or, God forfend, sweetened with sugar. GAH. It's Reconstruction all over again, the repulsive Quaker Co. carpetbaggers and their incomprehension. They should all get yellow fever is what I say, take it home with them, and come back only when they can appreciate grits.

But first we have to make good grits available and banish the bad grits.

[Are you thinking of My Cousin Vinny (the best I could find)? Because I am. Or wait: "The grits is cold" -- Bette Davis (6:30-6:50). The Little Foxes. Lillian Helman was a genius, and so was good old Bette.]

Now, I know you're thinking: with that lead in, how could this be anything you'd want to make? I think you ask this reasonably. But you remember that I started the stuffed mushrooms with visions of fungusy toenails, and pulled THAT one out of the fire. Have faith, little ones, I can do this.

I will be assisted in this task by my beautiful new bowl, a birthChristdaymas prezzie from the Brickman-Curzons. The bowl was handmade in Tuscaloosa by Neely Portera -- it has a sea-green wash inside, a brownish purple (fig-colored, I think) wash around the outside. Perfect.

The thing you want to do is start with good grits. By which I mean, non-factory grits, grits not imposed on you by the evil machinations of post-Sherman infiltrators.

If you can get them locally, more the better. We use stone-ground grits from Logan Turnpike Mill, which isn't far from where we live (it's in Blairsville). They're extremely coarse-ground and yellow. I prefer yellow because of the color, which isn't just yellow, but a complex mix of everything from deep brown to caramel to sunshine to golden.

Coarse-ground grits are actually better, since they don't dissolve into craptitude when they're cooked. They have actual substance. Which, you know, you probably want in food.

Grits cook at a 3:1 ratio; here, for two of us for breakfast, I've got 1 1/2 c water to 1/2 c grits. It's important to add salt to the boiling water, since for some reason salting grits after you cook them is really difficult to get right. I think I've got a scant tsp. of salt here.

In addition, you'll need some cheese, probably about a 1/4 c shredded (I've used jalapeno jack in the grits and a couple of spoonfuls of shredded cheddar for garnish) and a little jalapeno mash.

Here's how you do this:

1. Put the water and salt in a pan on high heat. Bring to a boil.

2. Dump in the grits. Stir. Turn the heat to medium so they don't pop all over the place. Keep it simmering, though, so don't turn it down too much.

3. Simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stirring every once in a while, until thickened.

4. Stir in cheese and jalapeno mash.

5. Eat.

See, like biscuits, which people think of as difficult, grits is easy. REALLY easy. Which makes it such an offense against God and nature that good ones are so hard to find.

Oh, and just in case you're in Carrollton, Millers grits --- VERY good. They use cream cheese and a lot of butter as the grits cook. That's another way to do it. They serve theirs with shrimp. Which of course for me ruins the whole thing, but that just makes me weird, I suppose.

There you go (with French toast, my birthday breakfast).

Turkey Shaped like a Football (under $15, about an hour)

I have the lyrics to "Secret Agent Man" (I know I used this in the last post, but it's just SO good) stuck in my head this morning. Only they're the wrong lyrics, they're the classically wrong lyrics: I'm hearing, secret... ASIAN man, secret... ASIAN man over and over again. It's a mystery. Can you be a secret Asian? Why would you keep that a secret, even if you could? Why can't the singer sing AGENT, with a nice hard G?

Look, I'm procrastinating. I need to write a paper, but instead I'm writing to you guys.

Everything isn't what it should be.

Welcome to meatloaf.

Once, I sat down at a table to a meatloaf made of god knows what dead animal -- what obese dead animal -- ground up and pressed into a big square corningware casserole. The grease was...impressive, if you're impressed by about half an inch of grease, say, floating on top of your meat. There was also ketchup somehow, but I never caught how.

I think of this particular meatloaf as an insult to the meatloaf deity.

My mother's meatloaf was never like that. When I ate beef, I liked hers, and conveniently enough when it's reshaped, it makes delightful meatballs. So when I stopped eating red meat, I began experimenting with her recipe. Her meatloaf was tender in the middle, crispy-edged (for those yummy heel pieces), savory, and remarkably ungreasy. I wanted that for my non-beef-loaf.

Here is what I came up with. Look at the pictures for what you want in consistency and meat-to-bread ratio. I make two loaves at a time and often freeze one for later.

about a pound and a half of ground poultry
about a pound and a half of poultry sausage (we like hot Italian turkey sausage when we can get it)
stale bread (maybe four cups), cut into cubes
about 1/2 c seasoned breadcrumbs
two eggs
some milk
oregano, thyme, red pepper flakes, salt
jalapeno paste, if you like it hot

Dump the cubes in a giant bowl.

Dump the ground poultry on top of that.

Squeeze the sausage out of the casings into the bowl. Discard the casings.

Add eggs.

Splash in maybe 3/4 c milk. Keep the milk out in case you need more.

Add the bread crumbs and spices.

With a potato masher, mash everything together. You want to do this until everything is WELL mixed, so give it some time. If the bread cubes aren't coming up into the meat, splash on a little more milk, but just a little at a time. Keep mashing. It should come together so that you can form balls of it with your hands. If you set them down, they should hold together and not crack or fall open. This may take five minutes of mashing, though I'd say it takes maybe two-three normally.

When you have everything mashed together, wash your hands, set the oven for 375 and get out two pans with edges. I use rectangular brownie pans because both with fit in my oven together. But use what you have and bake in stages if you have to. Lightly grease the bottom of the pans (I use spray grease). Divide the meat mixture in half, taking out one half with your hands and forming it into a footbally-loafy shape. Pat it smooth. Place it in one pan. Repeat with the other half and place it in the other pan.

Wash your hands (remember you're working with poultry) and then put the pans in the oven. Baking loaves can take from 45-60 minutes. You want to watch that they're uniformly brown on the outside, and they aren't pink in the middle.

If you need this in shorter order, divide the meat mixture in three or four and make smaller loaves: four loaves will cook in about 20-30 minutes.

To make meatballs, just form the meat mixture into balls whatever size you like. You can bake these, but I normally use a skillet and pan-cook them on the stove. Since they're very unfatty, you need a little olive oil in the skillet.

There you go.