— KAREN CARSON

So baba ganus is, uh, eggplant puree. So these are eggplants that I roasted on sheet tray. I cut them lengthwise, top to bottom, and then put them cut side down, put a whole glug of olive oil on the tray, and then roasted about 400 degrees until they were nice and soft and pokey from the top. What I'm then gonna do is just take a knife, uh, and not a knife, just a large spoon and scoop away from the skin. There's many ways to make pagano. It, it sort of transcends the entire Mediterranean basin and Southeast Asia in many ways. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. Mine, I don't claim any authenticity to mine, but what I do is I just take a knife and I go, I put the flesh of the eggplant down on the board and I chop it once across pretty finely. And then I go once more in the other direction, just kind of banging it down. Kinda like that butcher style chopping, uh, you're not doing a very fine French cut on it. And what you end up with, there's a pretty chunky puree into that. I mix lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil and salt, and it's just absolutely delicious. Puree. It goes on everything. It's best used. I mean, it can be used as a sauce. It can be used just, you know, dipping into tini. You can add tahini to it for a a, a flavor and nutritional kick. And there's so many things you can do to it. You can add some texture to it with some, maybe some diced onions, red onions. I would particularly agree with mint. Throw that in there. It really becomes this wonderful vehicle, this puree from which you can dress it up in any which way. Um, there you go. Baba GaN. B a b a g a n o u c h, Baba Ganouche. Uh, there's, there's a whole lot of different ways to spell it, but, uh, uh, there's also the s h spelling at the end there. So there you go.