We're foragers now!!!!

We're not really foragers. Well... at least we're not urban foragers in the sense that Andre in The League was a forager:

A few weeks ago I played Hodown! Throwdown! Showdown! with Pluff Mud Panic. If you're my mother, you probably read that last sentence and said "Wait... WHAT, Alison?!" I played in a frisbee tournament in Asheville with my club coed team. We arrived at the fields on Saturday morning at 6:45am because our first game was at 8am and life is brutal. No one should have to be functioning at that hour, especially me, especially me exercising. Anyway - here we are, warming up on some artificial turf fields and VIOLA! There's a bag of veggies in the middle of the fields! THREE eggplants and one large, white bell pepper in an Ingles bag**.

**for those of you who don't know, Ingles is the local grocer in Western, NC. They make popular products such as Laura Lynn Sport Drink. If you like gatorade, you'll LOVE sport drink.

This is my team Pluff Mud Panic. Pluff Mud is a poopy brown quick sand found in Charleston area. My team is from Charleston. If you get caught in poopy brown quick sand, you may start to panic. Thus, our team name. We're mostly all friends with each other now. 

No one claimed this bag during our three games so I urban foraged the hell out of that bag. B and I make a combined negative amount of money. This income becomes more negative during summer months. When filling out forms that say things like "what is your household income?" there isn't an option for how little we make because the number starts at zero**.

**Oh you're our friend and you're tired of hearing how poor one or both of us is?! WELL WE'RE TIRED OF BEING POOR. Love you. Please keep being our friend. One day we'll have incomes and go on beautiful adventures with you. XO. <3 Alison

Who WOULDN'T forage this? easiest forage ever.

I decided to make these eggplants into a delicious, spicy gnocchi thing. I already blogged a similar recipe to this one. Sorry. I'm honestly thinking about maybe changing this blog to "Clearing out the bunker: Adventures in creative freezer and cupboard eating" since most of what we've been eating has been in an effort to clear out the freezer and cupboards. We'll see.

Here is the list of ingredients: 

1 medium sized foraged eggplant (if it's not foraged, it doesn't count. Look it up)

1 lemon

Salt

Pepper

1 Shallot

1 clove of garlic

Red pepper flakes

1/2 red onion

1 tbsp tomato paste

Wine

Tomatos

Maybe some diced, canned tomatoes?

Bread is good

Can't have bread without butter!

Let's start by roasting the eggplant! Look at that fat, foraged, f**k (fork). That thing is beautiful. So free. So tasty. Peel and dice the eggplant. Cut it into pieces that are a little bigger than a die. 

Cut the lemon in half and get ready to squeeze it. This picture seems unnecessary. 

Coat the eggplant in olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper. Also you could let the eggplant sit out a while before you do this. Eggplants are super moist (worst word ever) and if you put them in a colander and let them drain for an hour+, that should help get some of the moisture out.

Let's take this moment to acknowledge the amount of salt we have in our kitchen. Top shelf - grinder sea salt and large tube of sea salt; bottom shelf - 2 large boxes of morton's salt and a new salt grinder. 

 B is super salty.

Lay the eggplant out on a cookie sheet and roast at 425 or so until they're brown and delicious looking like in this picture. I have no idea how long this was. It may have been around 30 minutes?

Then chop up the 1/2 red onion, add some olive oil, throw it in a blender or food processor with the roasted eggplant and press FRAPPE. 

Next, you'll want to get a spatula out to scrape up the eggplant and such. This part is rough because you'll have top open the anxiety drawer. This drawer has lots of utensils such as tongs, plastic tongs, can openers, wine openers. You may be thinking "but Alison, why are you saying all of these utensils in the plural as if you have mutiples of each?!" Because we have multiples of everything. Rather than contributing to the house, I just doubled everything B already had. My b.

B likes to open and shake the anxiety drawer to give me anxiety. He's a dream.

This is what the eggplant looks like. Honestly, feel free to stop here and eat it with chips. It's delicious. Alternatively, you may continue to make a sauce.

 Dice up them shallots.

Eat some eggplant with chips.

Put the shallots, oregano, salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil in a pan and stir around in the heat until they're a little translucent. In the words of my uncle, "let them mate".

Add some tomato paste and freeze the rest in dollops un the freezer. Then you can use them later. #momtips

Then add some wine and reduce it. WHAT DOES REDUCE MEAN?! Stir it around until it's all buddy buddy together. That's what that means.

Add the eggplant. Oh shit. Look at that! Delicious. What does this sauce need though? More tomatoes. What do we have in the cupboard? Some TJ's diced and fire roasted tomatoes and one large, plump juice tomato. 

 So I diced up the tomato and also added the fire roasted tomatoes.

We ate it with gnocchi because we're fancy AF.

We're so fancy we even left the cheese grater ON THE TABLE,

This was delicious. At some point I added red pepper flakes. It made it spicy. That was probably done before the reduction. Oh boy. I'm getting hungry just writing this post! You know... the other day I was trying to find a lemon chicken orzo soup recipe and I kept finding obnoxious blogs where all they did was ramble and never provide a recipe. That's so annoying. Who does that?

My computer wanted me to add this picture of Colby to the blog. What a savage.

Delicious Level: 5/5 It's just so delicious when you EARN your food by foraging it.

Difficulty: I think it's easy but I also just finished the wine I used for reduction.

Lessons Learned: I still haven't finished my dissertation. I really should do that. I find that creative writing helps me to reset my desire to write my dissertation. Or something. 

Here's to eatin' good and FORAGING local! Cheers and uff-da!