Pintesting in the Kitchen - Eggplant Caviar

Making the adjustment to having gestational diabetes isn't easy. Still in the stage where all I knew was that I had to eat and that I had to be even more mindful of what I was putting into my body I really had no choice about trudging forward and trying to make this work.

Today's pintest comes to us via this pin and the information found here - in French.

Ingredients you're going to need:
3-4 small eggplants - I chose to just use 1 large one

 3 tablespoons tahini / tahini / tahina (or sesame paste)

1 clove of garlic
Juice of one lemon
1 dash of olive oil
1 c. in s. of Labane or buttermilk
1/2 c. to c. ground cumin
salt
 
Description 

Preheat oven to 200 °.

Wash and prick the eggplants all over with a fork 

and place them on a baking sheet.  

Bake 20-25 minutes, turning halfway through cooking. By the time my 25 minutes was up, because I used a large eggplant the center wasn't cooked as well as I was going to need. I cut it open, removed a few seeds, and put it back in for another 12 minutes and 30 seconds. 

I was getting nowhere really fast and my headache and hunger was only getting much more intense. I flipped the eggplant over, turned the heat up to 300, and set my timer for 15 minutes and 30 seconds. I removed as many seeds as I could 

and hacked up the insides 

and put it all back into the oven for another 15 minutes.

Let cool, peel by holding the stem and remove the seeds. Keep only the flesh. Yes yes it is a bit tedious but the result is much better without grains!

Then mix together the flesh of the eggplant with garlic, tahini, lemon juice, cumin, Labane (or in my case buttermilk), a drizzle of olive oil and salt.

Stay far, far, far away from this time consuming recipe. Nothing about this was worth it for me.The taste was no good and I just about wish I could get that time back.

Breakfast Using My Home-made Butter

I now had a quart of buttermilk and no plans for it.

I also had a lot more whole milk than planned as well.

 Pancakes seemed like a great way to use them. Usually my husband is the pancake maker in the house (there's a whole story behind that but I'll leave that for another day) but he uses mix from a box.

I searched the internet for a recipe that I thought sounded delicious and decadent that would make good use of the buttermilk, whole milk, and butter.

Having recently purchased some particularly wonderful bacon it seemed this breakfast may have been meant to be.

The only thing I could think to improve upon making special pancakes for the hubs was to add blueberries. Unfortunately these weren't fresh frozen so the result was mostly tasteless blueberries.

The pancakes were topped with some of the syrup of Vermont local my mother knows, regularly brings back from her trips home for her friends.

The recipe calls for you to keep your wet ingredients separate from your dry until you're ready to cook.

Be careful not to over mix your batter. Mix until your streaks of flour disappear.You better bet your butt I used organic flour ;p

 If it's a little lumpy that's okay. Mixing until you get a super smooth batter causes a chemical reaction between the acid in the buttermilk and the base of the baking soda. Over mixing or stirring causes will activate the gluten in your flour, leaving you with a tougher, more rubbery pancake - and nobody wants that (except maybe the dog.)

I ended up chickening out at the last moment and making my husband cook them on the stove while I watched. I would have felt terrible if I completely ruined breakfast. This recipe makes a very serious stack of pancakes.

At long last we had breakfast. It was delicious, but that organic bacon was actually so good that it out-shined the pancakes!