I'm living temporarily with Sharon in Cambridge for a few months before I head out to California. Sharon was a huge influence on my cooking style when I lived with her ten years ago (as a nanny). We still like the same style of food- vegetarian mezze or noshes.
For her birthday, she got Ana Sortun's cookbook, Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, which I have in California. We immediately bookmarked a ton of recipes and started working our way through them. Last weekend we went to the Armenian stores in Watertown to stock up on some of the missing ingredients (aleppo pepper, chickpea flour, etc).
I started with a recipe I've made a few times- the beet tzatziki (page 252). It was as vibrant and pink as ever, but I made the mistake of boiling the beets instead of roasting them. The dip was watery (we had to strain it) and not as sweet.
The same night I made the smoky eggplant puree with pine nuts (page 144) because I had some leftover eggplants from the garden and farmers market that were on their last legs. I debated whether the pin nuts were necessary, but they really added a lot to the dip. It was amazing and will become a regular in my repertoire.
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