EGGPLANT EMPRESS: Sunday dinner you wish you were invited to: Turkish Eggplant, Rosemary Chicken, and Butternut Squash Salad

Someone threatened that if yet another post was made without mention of eggplant, the title of this blog, while possessing alliterative merit, symmetry, and general phonetic grace, would be bull. Ok, no one did, but this might be my thought if I was you. So, you want eggplant? Well, I got eggplant. Eggplant so good that whoever presides over your institution of worship (note that I'm friendly to alternative religions: the Mother Goddess, the stars and moon, Kandinsky, and Jim Morrison are all acceptable such supreme-beings) might just faint.

There's a reason that Imam Bayildi, translated to "the Imam Fainted," is the name of this Turkish dish, only it isn't intuitive. The tale goes that when the Imam learned his new wife had depleted all 12 barrels of olive oil -received just 12 days prior, on their wedding day, as her dowry- he fainted. Apparently the dish that he so loved and that he requested she cook nightly required far more olive oil than he could imagine. I can attest to this.

Imam Bayildi is made in several steps, and almost every juncture involves olive oil. First, the eggplants are fried (lightly) in olive oil. Second, they are topped with a ratatouille-esque mixture that was simmered in olive oil. Then, they're baked (no O.O.) and finally, are topped with pine nuts that could be toasted, I suppose, but that I fried in olive oil because that's what my Mom (a slammin' Mediterranean/Middle Eastern cook) does. And, I was having guests over; I wanted their first experiences with Imam Bayildi to be as passionate, as illicit, as mine was in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosphorus.

This is what you need:

First, peel stripes off the sides at 1" intervals, cut each eggplant in half lengthwise, salt the flesh, and set on paper towels for about 25 minutes to draw out the bitter juices in the eggplant:

Then, heat some olive oil and fry the eggplant, flesh side down, until it has taken some color but isn't cooked all the way through:

Once the flesh is golden, turn over for about 3 minutes:

Next, chop onions (lengthwise) and mince the garlic. Sautee both in the same pan used to fry the eggplant until they're translucent. Add the tomatoes, and simmer for a few minutes:

Then add the currants, thyme, dill, salt, and pepper to complete the topping:

Now that the eggplant and the topping are finished, put the eggplant halves in a baking dish, and top top them generously with the filling:

Now they're ready to bake! While they're in the oven, in a small pan, heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil on medium high heat for a couple minutes, and drop the pine nuts in the hot pan. Wait! Before doing this, make sure to have a plate with a paper towel on it (for soaking up the excess oil) near by. When the pine nuts start to take color, they go from a beautiful caramel color to BLACK in no time, so you want to make sure that you can remove them from the pan and stop the cooking process as soon as you need to. Seriously, don't step away from your stove- the following photos capture a process that takes place in, umm, about 3 minutes, start to finish:

The eggplant, once baked, looks gorgeous. The tops have browned slightly and the onions have almost caramelized. Hold off on sprinkling the pine nuts on the hot dish until just before serving or they'll get soggy:

Now, one dish down, two to go! Rewind twenty-four hours, and that's when the rosemary and garlic chicken prep starts (a very Joycean time structure to this post, I know). I used a recipe that intended for this to be a 30 minute meal (courtesy of Ms. Ray, obviously) but I modified it by upping the marination time about 27,561%. When finished, every bite of this chicken was infused with the taste of rosemary, and the marinating time was key; its the difference between tasting rosemary on top and bottom of the chicken, and tasting its essence IN the chicken.

This is what you need:

Mince the garlic, chop the rosemary, and coat the chicken along with salt, pepper, EVOO (Food Network allusion there, for those of you who didn't get that) and balsamic vinegar:

Cover refrigerate until a half an hour or so before you start cooking it so that *important:* the chicken is at room temp when you start to cook it. Put a couple tablespoons of EVOO (I promise this will end after this post!) in a large pan and cook for about 6 minutes on both sides:

Finally, the butternut squash salad. Amazing, so simple, light, and the paragon of seasonality in food. I had just the round of a butternut squash left over from the soup so I peeled it, cut it into wedges, and boiled them till they were tender, but not falling apart. For the dressing, I used:

I put a little of each in a clean jar, and shook it:

I wish I could give you the proportions- I'd guess it was a tablespoon of each of the liquids, a dash of each of the seasonings, and a few thyme leaves. I gave it a shake and tried it; the first round was well seasoned but too acidic so I poured out about a third of it and added more apple cider to neutralize the vinegar. A little more salt and pepper, and round two was lovely. I poured it over the squash, and tossed lightly to get this beautiful salad: