There's something in the air around here. I've been on an Asian kick for the past week. Sushi, stir fries, sweet-and-sour - I just can't get enough of it! Two of my Asian favorites are sweet-and-sour eggplant, and peanut sauce with stir-fried peppers and water chestnuts.

Sweet-and-Sour Eggplant

Here in Montana, I had to leave most of my eggplant in the garden as long as I could. It just doesn't get hot enough here to grow bumper crops of eggplant, but I'm pleased to say that the season closed with the harvest of a few beauties. My college friend Ambrose gave me this eggplant recipe years ago, and it's fantastic.

• 3-4 eggplants, small dice


• 1/2 cup peanut oil


• 1/2 cup ginger root (about 1 medium/small piece), small dice


• 1/4 cup garlic (about 1 medium/small bulb), small dice


• 1/8 cup sesame oil


• 1/2 cup soy sauce


• 1/2 cup sugar


• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar

Directions: Saute eggplant in peanut oil until brown (can't really overcook). Set aside to cool. Saute garlic and ginger in sesame oil until slightly caramelized. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook over low heat for 3 min. Mix with eggplant and let sit for at least an hour. Serve hot or cold.

This stuff is delicious over rice or noodles, but my favorite is with pita bread triangles toasted in the oven. That's the best kitchen tip I've got: Dress up any dip or dish with toasted pita triangles. They're easy prep and much prettier than your standard dipping chip.

Peanut Sauce with Stir-Fried Peppers and Water Chestnuts

I learned of this peanut sauce recipe while hiking in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness a few years ago. Someone on the trip brought a plastic jar of this stuff on the trail, and after a day of hard hiking, I thought this was the best sauce I'd ever eaten. I don't know if you're familiar with the phenomenon where food tastes better when you're tired, in the middle of the woods, and without a variety of resource, but this sauce has nothing to do with that. It was just as good when I tried it at home, and I got to eat twice as much because I didn't have to share.

• 1/2 cup peanut butter


• 1/2 cup warm water


• 2 Tbsp tamari


• 2 Tbsp sugar


• 1 tsp rice vinegar (or other white vinegar)


• 3 cloves garlic, chopped


• 1 inch slice of ginger root, grated or chopped


• cilantro, cayenne, and salt, to taste

The original directions suggest that you mix the peanut butter with warm water first, but I like to mix the warm water with all of the other ingredients, mix in the peanut butter, and then add extra water to taste. If you have time, letting the sauce sit before serving allows all the flavors to mix nicely.

Stir-fry whatever you can find in your garden. It's been cold around here, and my pickings are pretty slim. I was able to round up a few peppers for this, but there wasn't much else that hasn't been canned or frozen (some by me, and some by the frost!). The peanut sauce really takes front and center with this dish, so you can slip in whatever veggies you like.

Harvest time this year has brought much more produce that we could imagine. It seems like everything I've made in the kitchen lately has been an attempt to maximize the path between the garden and the dinner table - I must say it's made for some interesting pizza concoctions.


Having a lot more produce has also led to a recent salsa experiment. I've made plenty of fresh salsa before (which I love), but I've never tried any cooked salsa. If I didn't have all these tomatoes, I might have skipped it, but cooked salsa will keep much longer than the fresh stuff. Now that it's done, I plan on eating salsa from the garden throughout the winter. I also plan on using up many of those mystery peppers that came from the assorted pepper mix of seeds!

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil


• 30 or so smaller tomatoes


• 2 green peppers


• Assorted peppers (hot and otherwise)


• 1 large onion


• 1/4 cup vinegar


• 1/4 cup sugar


• 3 tablespoons of salt


• 4 cloves of garlic

Chop/dice all the veggies. Sautee onions and peppers with the garlic. Combine with the tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar in a large pot. Simmer anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour to thicken the salsa and let the flavors mix. Salt to taste, and enjoy!

There are all kinds of fun variations you can do with cooked salsa. You can add corn, beans, apples... it's up to you and your garden!

After making a blackberry pie, I got to wondering what other kinds of pies I could make. Could I use native berries? Recently we spent a vacation in a National Forest Service fire lookout cabin. These are a sweet deal at around $50 a night, but you have to reserve them way in advance. Anyway, I brought along a pie crust. My son G and I gathered several cups of native salal berries while waiting for Emily to come out of the campground shower. For comparison's sake, we also gathered several cups of blueberries and raspberries from a local u-pick farm.

I carefully divided the pie into three sections, each with its own type of berry. The plan was to evaluate each berry on its own merits, without mixing flavors.

The blueberry pie turned out pale and bland. You know how cherries turn somewhat translucent when you cook them? The same happens with big blueberries. The beautiful dusty blue skins of the fresh fruit are simply overwhelmed by their bulging insides. The larger the fruit, the lower the ratio of skin to interior.

The raspberry pie tasted like jam. Rich, but very jammy storebought jam.

But the Salal berry pie: there's something magic going on in there. Perhaps because they've such a high skin to interior ratio, the color and flavor was a hundred times richer than the blueberry pie. In addition to being a smaller berry, the salal berry is actually a fleshy sepal enclosed over a ripened ovary. What that means to a cook is there are multiple layers of berry skin all folded up inside the berry. I often hear that most of a fruit's nutrition and flavor is contained in the skin, so it's no surprise to me that the very sweet salal berry pie was almost too rich to eat. But it wasn't just a more conventional berry flavor magnified. It was a new flavor, fully developed only in the cooked berries. The closest I can describe the taste is that it has something in common with cinnamon. But that's not quite it either.

It's best to soak salal berries first before cooking with them. There's a little worm that likes to hide in there, probably the larvae of some beautiful endangered forest butterfly. Still, I don't want to eat them. When the berries are placed in water, the little caterpillars climb up to the surface, looking for air.

Emily and I both agreed, blackberry pie is still the best, a little tart but wonderful with ice cream. Emily didn't care for the salal berry pie, but I feel drawn to it, challenged by its new flavor, encouraged to try other native berries. Next time, I think I'll try mixing salal berries it with blackberries. The salal will add an extra spiciness and sweetness to the otherwise uniformly tart but delicious blackberry pie.