My babaghanouj instincts

     Now that I've got a working computer, it means that I don't have to wait a million hours for the family Dell to upload photos.  This means that I can actually INCLUDE them, yay! Sooo let's get started.

     When I've made babaghanouj in the past, I've always just sorta eyeballed.  Of course, I used recipes as a guide, but I never quite followed them exactly.  And, ya know, it's almost always turned out good, in my opinion.  Tonight, though, as an experiment, I decided to actually follow a recipe from one of my books, and to be honest it wound up tasting like a waste of a small, perfectly good eggplant.  Looked good, though:

Pretty good, anyway.  To be fair, I didn't use a blender or food processor on this.  I thought, for whatever reason, that mashing it by hand might be...interesting?  I also roasted the eggplant like this:

(like the recipe told me), as opposed to cubing it up like I usually do.  This made for a mixture that was a bit too wet for my liking.  Also, I used mint, which isn't something I usually add.  Actually, I usually add very little in terms of seasoning, not even garlic.  For this batch, I did some grindin' (not part of the recipe, but hey, I couldn't resist).  Mint, black pepper and sesame seeds-

     But, yeah, overall I think I'm gonna stick to eyeballing and taste-testing.

     Even though I didn't really like it, I wasn't gonna waste the stuff.  So I put it on a piece of toasted quinoa bread from Trader Joe's, and added it to my hodge-podge dinner of vegetable samosas (also TJ's) and some random veggies I was trying to use up.  For dessert? Apples and bananas that I topped with an impromptu mixture of plain Greek yogurt, cinnamon and Nutella :D

Sounds weird, I know, but it was actually really nice and rich and the Nutella cut down on the sharpness of the yogurt just enough. I LOVE Nutella.  I wish I could find a vegan version, but I might just have to find a way to make one : )  And oh, I almost forgot, the whole time I was cooking this stuff, I was snacking diligently on some awesome, lemony kale chips (I recently tried these for the first time, and have made several batches since). Why oh why must I add copious amounts of lemon juice to everything? Yum.