Zaalouk

Hello again, some new input for cooking - finally. I have discovered a new podcast which is about cooking - like the format because it is very entertaining, with good tips and various stuff, paleo, vegan, ketogenic - hadn't even heard this last one before.
So I got inspired by the recipe for Zaalouk, a Moroccon recipe. As I heard in the podcast, these are the ingredients: Garlic, shallots, olive oil, eggplant, diced tomatoes - very ripe or canned -, salt,
turmeric, cumin, paprika, black pepper, cilantro and parsley.
More or less it went like this:
make your base with olive oil, minced garlic and diced shallots, add diced eggplant and let it simmer with a medium low temperature. - It takes some patience because the eggplant needs time to take up the oil and get cooked, maybe even 30 minutes, add the rest and let it simmer for another 10 minutes. With a fork, mash the whole mixture up, so there will still be texture but not large pieces of eggplant
Since I still have frozen eggplant here which I brought from Italy, I took up the idea at once.
Here is what I did:
1 onion
1 cup of wild garlic
olive oil
1 eggplant
1 can of italian cherry tomatoes
turmeric
cumin
chili powder
cilantro
parsley

Zaalouk with home made spelt flour bread and white and red rice with avocado

I was a bit disappointed because it somehow seemed to bland for me, I would have thought that it is more interesting - and I am not talking about spiciness from the chili. Maybe it was the absence of garlic and the wild garlic wasn't strong enough in taste or just not enough, who knows.
So the next day, I cooked it some more, with a little water added, lots more of turmeric and cinnamon. I mashed it some more with a food processor and added a generous sprinkle of lemon.
Next time I would even add more of these spices, maybe roast the cumin in a pan first. However, it is a great vegan  and gluten-free dish to eat with some rice or couscous or use it as a spread on some toasted bread.
For the whole procedure, why don't you listen to this podcast. It is called harvest eating and really worth listening to.

Vegan Butternut-Zucchini Ceviche

Usually a Ceviche would be raw fish, marinated with lime, originally from Peru but I also tasted it in Costa Rica. Very yummy. This time I stole the word for a purely vegan dish. The important thing is to slice the pieces in very fine stripes and leave it at least two hours - better more with the marinade.

So here we go:

VERY thin slices of butternut and zucchini, marinate with lots of lime juice and sea salt. After two hours add the oil. I used grape-seed oil this time.

Yellow beet carpaccio

My inspiration for today came along doing two detours. Listening to a foodie podcast, I arrived at the blog of Bushcook, which I mentioned already in a former post. This time she made a beetroot carpaccio with bottarga.
As usual, I changed the recipe a little bit. First of all, I used yellow beetroot from the farmer's market which has a more delicate taste and doesn't color your hands as the red ones do.
It took me a long time to gather the courage to cook these. At home we never made them, not even during my time working in the catering business. Just having a talk with the vendor at the farmer's market some time ago I decided to prepare them myself. In fact, you get the red ones all the time, already cooked, but the yellow beets seem to be a rather new species. Actually, if you have ever cooked potatoes, it is just the same. Leave them in their peel and cook them with a little salt about 20-30 minutes until they are done. Peel them and cut them into very thin slices. The seasoning I made was lemon, a little salt and olive oil, topping it with grated (organic) orange peel which I stored in my freeze during the winter season. We had had two large boxes of Sicilian oranges in January and all the peel was taken away before using the juice or eating them.
In the end I sprinkled grated bottarga on them. Now this might ask for some logistics. It is called the Sardinian caviar or the roe of the grey mullet. Wikipedia tells me that it is also soldin other European countries and Japan, even Africa and Florida. Since it is dried and lasts very long, you might be lucky to try it. We brought it from Sardinia which is our favorite food shopping region. The taste is very special and for me it doesn't resemble the taste of the usual caviar but is much more earthy and smoky.
Andrew Zimmern, which I like very much, made a great video about food in Sardinia, here is a snippet about bottarga.

On this picture you can see it as well on the bottom left

It has a form like a locust bean