Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Garlic Sauce

I found a recipe for rigatoni with eggplant and garlic sauce, but I guess I don't like eggplant enough to eat it regularly. But the garlic sauce was fantastic, and actually relatively healthy, as far as creamy sauces go, so I thought I'd share. And on a more personal note, I would encourage you not to eat this before swim practice, I had awful stomach aches due to all the dairy.
  • 1/2 head of garlic
  • 2 cups milk
  • Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
  • 3 branches thyme or 2 pinches of dried
  • 2 Tablespoons chopped basil or 1 teaspoons dried
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 Tablespoons butter
  • 1 1/3 Tablespoons flour (ie. 1 Tbsp+1 tsp)
  • Grated parmesan/romano cheese to taste
Peel and press the garlic and cook in the milk, with the nutmeg, thyme, basil, and bay leaf over low heat. Make a roux (new cooking term, yay, which essentially means a thick sauce made from a mixture of fat and flour) by adding the flour to the butter and cooking for a few minutes. Then add the milk mixture and whisk. Cook over the lowest heat for half an hour, stirring frequently. When done cooking, add cheese and use as you like.

My recipe involved browning eggplant and making rigatoni, then baking it all together. This was okay, but like I said, I'm not a huge fan of eggplant, but I wanted to try it according to the recipe before making recommendations. I think this would definitely be a great sauce with some sauteed red pepper and maybe some spinach.

2 comments:

  1. Have you tried other types of eggplant (I'm assuming you got the big purple kind)? The little purple and white striped ones and the long skinny ones are actually pretty good. I don't like the big purple ones at all...I think it's a texture thing :-)
    And a good tip for dealing with any eggplant is to slice, sprinkle with salt (ideally kosher salt) and let it sit for 5-10 minutes. Then rinse off the salt and pat them with paper towels to remove the excess moisture. That helps to get rid of the bitter flavor that can sometimes be overpowering.

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  2. That was how I prepared them... sort of (I was a little lazy with the salt sprinkling, I put them on a cutting board and kind of tossed them in salt and kind of haphazardly sprinkled them with salt, but it was kosher because that is all I have besides my sea salt grinder). But maybe next time I go to the farmers market I'll look for other kinds. I had eggplant at an Indian restaurant last month and it was great, but now that I think about it I think they said it was petite eggplant or something. Oh well, next time.

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