smitten kitchen

Here is the latest update from smittenkitchen.com:

smitten kitchen | caponata

I am never a better citizen of the sidewalks of New York than I am when I have a newborn, or at least the variety we’ve been assigned twice now: those that can only be calmed by long walks in the stroller. And so we stroll, even though it’s unforgivably hot out, even though we rarely get out of the apartment early enough to enjoy those brief parts of the day when there’s an actual shady side of the street to hover on, even though we really don’t need anything else from the Greenmarket or anywhere else, we make up excuses so we have somewhere to go. On the best of days, we see people that we know and the neighborhood feels like something out of Mr. Rogers (although his is notably absent of the guy who yells outside my apartment all day about his superstitions and the clouds of secondhand decriminalized smoke we wade through). We bumped into my son’s old preschool teacher a few weeks ago, someone who likes to cook almost as much as me, and she said she’d recently made a big batch of caponata and had been having it with everything — for breakfast with an egg, in sandwiches for lunch and even with pasta for dinner and I thought that sounded absolutely brilliant. I just needed to learn how to make caponata.

I read a lot and I learned several things about this eggplant dish. First, definitely don’t try to exhaust yourself by finding a one/true/authentic version. Just about all are authentic and true and few match, because everyone makes it the best way they know how and that’s usually the way their grandmothers made it and you have to be out of your mind if think I’m going to argue with a Sicilian grandmother. However, I knew a few things: I knew that while I am completely okay with frying eggplant the authentic way that it’s totally cool if you’d like to just roast or sauté it. I wanted to stick to a core list of ingredients — eggplant, onion, celery, tomato, capers, olives, raisins, basil and pine nuts — because while you can add a whole lot of things — i.e. garlic, zucchini, sweet or hot peppers, anchovies — I had a hunch there’s enough going on in the flavor department with the core list that it wouldn’t need much more to taste good.