Baba Ghanoush

On Sunday Jeff and I went on another hike with a local hiking group. In the course of our trek, we chatted with an ex-pat American woman who had attended a demostration of some traditional Lebanese cooking techniques. One of the things she'd learned was a traditional method of making baba ghanoush, the delicious eggplant dip with a mildly smoky flavor that tastes so good on flat bread. She told us that the best way to cook the eggplant before squishing it up into dip was to simply roast it over an open flame, peel the charred skin off, and then voila--eggplant dip.
 
I decided to give the technique a try. I covered the stovetop with foil, as I knew the roasting process would be a messy proposition. With the aid of a fork stuck in either end of the eggplant, I plopped it right on the burner and waited to see what happened. Sure enough, the skin began to crinkle and char, and juices began to bubble out through holes cut in the skin. I kept turning the eggplant much as you would with a marshmallow over a campfire. Although the woman told us that it took about 30 minutes to roast a whole eggplant, mine seemed to lose all structural integrity after about 15 minutes. It just flopped messily whenever I tried to turn it, and I feared that at any moment it would fall apart completely. So I took it off the burner, let it steam in a covered glass dish for about 10 minutes, and then cut it open.
 
As I peeled the blackened skin off it, I observed that the outside flesh was nice and mushy, but the inside was still pretty stringy. I should have let it roast for the whole thirty minutes! Nonetheless, I tried to leave the stringiest bits out and did my best to mash up the rest with a fork. I then added some tahini, olive oil, lemon juice (from a lemon from a Druze woman's lemon tree; a souvenir from an earlier hike), and garlic and stirred it all up the best I could. It ended up looking like the baba ghanoush you'd see in a restaurant, but when you stick a fork in it, you discover that it is as stringy as the guts of a pumpkin. Next time I'll definitely let it cook longer.
 
Oh, and in the last photo, Jeff shows off how appetizing the fresh eggplant looked before I started roasting it to death!