Bánh mì

The Baguette Box in Seattle has a really great sandwich with coconut braised tofu as the main ingredient for their take on bánh mì. Lately when we've gone the quality seems to be slipping, which means it's time to start making it for ourselves. One of the great ingredients to this dish is the pickled daikon radish and carrots. Crispy but pungent with the taste of vinegar, they add a really nice dimension to the sandwich. Add to this the coconut braised tofu and the avocado and coriander, and it's a great dish.

Last time I tried to make the pickled vegetables, they came out wrong. This time I learned a better trick. What I failed to do last time was get enough water out of the daikon and carrots to allow the vinegar and sugar to properly penetrate. Much like the eggplant dish, the solution is simply to douse them with salt. To make them, julienne your daikon and carrots and then liberally sprinkle them with salt and about two teaspoons of sugar. In a big bowl, mix the ingredients with your hands for a few minutes. After a short time you'll see water pooling in the bottom, and once that starts to happen you'll notice the daikon and carrots have relaxed their crispness a bit. At that point you can actually pick up and squeeze the sticks to help get even more moisture from them. You'll know you're done when the daikon can be easily bent without snapping; you can even make the ends touch.

Once that's done, place the vegetables in a one quart jar with the following brine mixture:

1 1/4 cups distilled white vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup water

In the picture you can see that the carrots (which were of a variety that's purple on the outside) have turned the brine a deep red.

As for the coconut braised tofu, I tried braising deep-fried tofu in coconut milk with some garlic and ginger. I ended up with tofu with a creamy coconut coating, but not at all what I was looking for, so there's plenty of work still to be done here. But you can feel free to use any sort of "main" ingredient in its place. Just make sure to add the pickled veggies, the avocado and of course the coriander for freshness.

If you have any ideas on the coconut braised tofu preparation, please let me know!

Grilled Vegetable Panini

First of all, pardon the pictures. Normally, I would spend some time trying to actually light or stage them, but lately I simply want to eat, so consider it amateur photo-journalism.

We recently bought a little kitchen gadget I've been finding more and more uses for. It's called the "Griddler" from Cuisinart. Really, it's just a panini grill, but it has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It can be used as a press grill, but you can also open it up flat and use it as a griddle.

For this panini, I cut up zucchini, eggplant and red peppers, then pressed them with the grill press until they were nicely cooked through. I tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper and then spread them on to a slice of focaccia bread.

From there I made two separate sandwiches: one with brie and one with mozzarella and olives. I had been inspired by a great brie and olive sandwich we had in Vancouver.

A quick press in the grill and we had two great sandwiches. I really liked the brie, though I don't think it worked for my wife, so if you're not feeling adventurous, I'd stick to mozzarella.

Tomato Season

We purchased 15 lbs. of tomatoes and turned them into 3 lbs. of condensed and delicious sauce. It's certainly a good way to get proficient at peeling and deseeding. One big tip I can offer:

• It's a lot faster to deseed a tomato if you cut it across its "equator", rather than lengthwise. The reason being that the cell walls between the seed sacs run up and down the tomato, so cutting with the walls means you have to break through them with your finger. Cutting the other way means you've got access to all the seeds at once.

Normally I don't salt the tomatoes when they're being roasted, but I gave it a shot this time. The idea being that the salt would help draw out the moisture more quickly from the tomatoes, letting it get down to the business of caramelizing more quickly. We let these sit in a low oven (about 250 degrees Fahrenheit) for about 4.5 hours, so I can't say if it really helped that much. It did translate into less salt later in the process, but if too much salt were added, you might be in trouble down the road.

Eggplant Parmesan Sandwiches

Eggplant has been a much maligned and misunderstood vegetable in my house. Soggy texture, odd flavor; all reasons to have left it well alone for years. But after a series of frankly really great eggplant dishes over the past year, we decided to figure out how we had got off on the wrong foot with this versatile little purple globe.

Our mistake (and other's who had served us their dishes) was to cut the eggplant and immediately put it into service. Eggplant holds a lot of water, even though it seems rather dry on first inspection. Like mushrooms, if you don't get the water out of them, you can't get much flavor into them. You'll also end up with a mushy and soggy texture bomb your mouth won't be thrilled by. Luckily, it's easy to wrest the water from the eggplant's grasp, you just need to apply some chemistry. In our case, just salt. I cut the eggplant into slices, salt both sides liberally and leave it on a cooling rack for about half an hour. Using a towel you can dab away the water droplets that will form on the surface of the slices. After about an hour, you can actually pick them up and wring them out like a sponge (though I would recommend a gentler pressing method if you intend to preserve the slice's shape, like in our case).

Once finished, the eggplant is now ready to take on a variety of flavors and add a pleasant bit of body to any dish you're preparing. In my case, I wanted to recreate an eggplant parmesan sandwich we ran across at a local pub.

Like chicken parmesan, the eggplant will be cut into cutlet-like slabs, prepped as discussed above, then breaded and pan-fried. The breading is accomplished in the same way you would with any cut of meat.

To prepare you breading station, you'll need a dish containing about a cup of AP flour. You'll need one or two eggs, beaten and placed in a dish with tall sides to contain it. Finally, you'll need a dish containing panko or bread crumbs. The trick here is that you're mixing dry with wet, so if you don't use some precautions, you'll ended up with breaded fingers and a big mess. To solve this, devote each hand to a separate task: one for handling dry ingredients, the other for wet.

First, grab an eggplant slice with your dry hand and place it in the flour. Liberally cover all sides of the eggplant with the flour, then lift it out and pat the excess flour off. Now, drop the eggplant into the dish with the beaten eggs. Using your wet hand (for me that's my right hand), dredge the eggplant through the egg to cover it completely. Lift it out and transfer it to the breadcrumbs. I usually drop the eggplant and use my dry hand to cover the top of the slice with breadcrumbs, then flip it over and cover again. Make sure you cover the side walls of the slice as well, not just the tope and bottom. Now just tap off the excess and set aside.

Once you've breaded all your cuts, you're ready to fry them. I do this over medium heat with enough oil to just barely start to come up the side of the eggplant when it's laid flat in the pan. Make sure you're using an oil that can stand up to the heat (read: NOT extra-virgin olive oil). I use a grapeseed oil since it contributes fairly minimally to the taste of the dish.

Once both sides are brown, remove and pat dry.

At this point find some ciabatta bread, some good marinara sauce, parmesan, mozzarella, and provolone. Combine and brown the cheese under a broiler.