Friday Night Quickie

Sorry to disappoint you readers expecting a more lurid topic, but "Friday Night Quickie" refers to the dish of eggplant with gnocchi that I whipped up last week between work and running off to the Met to see the world's sexiest baritone — I'm excluding myself out of modesty — in Simon Boccanegra.

The swoon-worthy Dmitri Hvorostovsky

Sadly, Mr. Hvorostovsky's voice was not in the best shape — it sounded a bit thinner than I've heard it in the past, and I think he is pushing a bit these days — but his pecs featured gloriously in the production, particularly in the scenes in which he was attired in a sort of 14th-century dressing gown open down to the bottom of his sternum, so my opera glasses got quite a workout and I left the theater fully satisfied.  Oh, and — sorry I got a bit distracted by my Siberian eye-and-ear candy — the eggplant dish was delicious and easy.  Like Dmitri's high notes when I heard them last season in Trovatore.

Here's how I whipped up my pre-opera dinner.  The sauce was created in the morning during a break between students  using some ingredients I found in my fridge and freezer:

Swoon-worthy ingredients: an eggplant, a bag of frozen tomatoes, some frozen chopped dill, half an onion, some garlic

I started by slicing the half onion and several cloves of garlic and sauteing them with fresh-ground pepper in quite a lot of olive oil. (Eggplant is an oil sponge, and its taste/texture benefit from soaking up as much as possible.  This is not a dish for low-fat diets.)

Next, I cut the eggplant into 1" cubes.  (Get out your rulers; it is crucial for each cube to measure exactly 1 inch on each side.  Not!)  When the onions had softened (5 minutes-ish), I put in the eggplant cubes and stirred around until the oil had been evenly absorbed.  With eggplant, you need to start stirring immediately after adding it to the oil; otherwise, the greedy bottom layer would drink up all the oil, leaving none for the rest of the pile.

I cooked this for a few minutes, stirring more or less continually, until the eggplant looked like this:

Then I dumped in my frozen tomatoes.  You could use canned tomatoes for this as well — or fresh, if you have them.  Canned tomatoes would produce a sauce-ier dish, but equally delicious.  I also added a bit of salt.

I stirred this up, covered it, and left it to simmer until the eggplant was cooked (10-15 minutes, I think, but just taste a piece of eggplant to be sure).  Then I dumped in a big pile of chopped dill and stirred it up and let it simmer for 5 more minutes.  Notice how I've learned not to add the fresh herb too early in the process, thereby cooking the flavor right out.

That's it for the sauce.  I went back to teaching for a few more hours — there is a huge advantage to working at home, I'll admit.  In the evening, when I was ready for my pre-opera meal, I put the sauce back on a low flame to reheat and assembled my remaining ingredients:

Fresh gnocchi from the refrigerated section of WF, a block of grating cheese (Asiago, in this case)

What is it about gnocchi?  I find it to be just about the most satisfying food texture of all, those little squishy dumplings that soak up every drop of sauce.  They're also frustratingly UN-satisfying as well, since I can never seem to get enough of them.  Maybe it's this duality of opposing characteristics that fascinates me so much.  In any case, I ❤ gnocchi almost as much as I ❤ Dmitri H.  (He's not squishy.  Nor does he soak up much sauce, so the gnocchi wins that competition, by a hair.  A silver hair.)

A few minutes before mealtime, I brought a pot of salted water to the boil, added the gnocchi, and let it cook until done.  Another delightful aspect of gnocchi is how quickly it cooks — in only a minute or two, the little dumplings float to the surface, indicating their readiness.  I drained them in a strainer and put a little pile on my plate.  On top, I ladled some eggplant/tomato/dill sauce and grated a layer of cheese:

Quick and easy pre-theater meal

After downing this tasty dish, I donned my opera finery (including a shirt hand-crafted by my own DP) and rushed off to be transported back into the world of 14th-century Italian political intrigue, starring that tasty silver-haired dish as the doge. . . .