So many of the dishes I make again and again were once shown to me. Some of my favorite moments as a food writer were spent with readers in their homes, learning about the dishes they feed their families or, if they were chefs, customers.
I cannot remember his name, but I spent a wonderful afternoon once with a really cool Turkish guy who had married an American CDC researcher, put his own career on hold and decided to open a little Turkish cafe in Decatur. I remember him telling me, “Decatur is so beautiful! Not the architecture — that is ugly. But the spirit of the place is beautiful.”
I had gone to him to learn lahmanjun — a kind of flatbread that involved making a yeasted dough and a spicy minced lamb topping. It was a good, if involved, recipe. But the lagniappe was the roasted eggplant salad he prepared with a couple of knives he brandished like drumsticks in a performance of “Wipeout.”
I have since made this eggplant salad seventy eleven zillion times, enough so that it is my own recipe now. I make it as the main dish for a vegetarian dinner at home, and I make it as a pre-dinner snackum when guests come over. I suspect it is no longer actually Turkish as I may have left out a key ingredient and added a suspicious one. I don’t know.
My best advice to anyone roasting eggplant is this: Get it nice and charred over the flame (or electric burner — it works), enclose it in a Ziploc and put it in the fridge overnight. The skin will slip off without any burnt fingers, the bitter juices will have all oozed out, and the smoky flavor will have intensified. See?
Split the eggplant and remove any large seed sacs if you’re so inclined. Chop it into glop. For one medium eggplant, add about 1/4 cup of diced red onion, 2 slivered scallions, 1 crushed garlic clove (maybe two) two or three tomatoes on the vine (cut at the hemisphere, seeds plucked out, diced), lemon juice, salt, a pinch of cayenne, about 1/4 cup of minced parsley or mint, and a megaglug of olive oil (let it bloop twice). Taste and adjust with salt and lemon. It keeps well, but will need a glug more of oil if it stiffens up after too long in the fridge.
We had it one night with salad, roasted potatoes, toasted pita wedges and hot sauce. Then we binge-watched “Shtisel” and went to bed, ready for another day of weird life.