Four years!

Yesterday Jason and I celebrated our four years of marital bliss! It's weird how anniversaries reset once you get married, but Jason and I do fully intend on celebrating our ten year anniversary of being together next October. We had a very nice day: we went to the museum and saw the Carnegie International: Life on Mars (loved it!), finally saw the new dinosaur exhibit, and of course, ate lots of good food!





We had lunch at Phipps (chocolate salad mmmm!) and a snack at Maggie's Mercantile, but we couldn't decide on a restaurant that would be both fancy and suit our diet for dinner, so we made a feast at home with from our constant cooking companion Isa! We made eggplant and artichoke alla Napoletana which is basically making fried eggplant like you would for eggplant parmesan but instead of topping it with cheese and sauce you make this delicious filling:

2-4 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon of thyme
1/2 teaspoon of salt
some black pepper
6-8 plum tomatoes diced
2 cups artichokes chopped coarsely (we used the frozen ones from Traders Joe's, if not available, make sure you rinse any seasonings, it'll mess up the flavor!)
1/3 cup capers
1/4 fresh basil
you can also add a 1/2 or so of thinly sliced kalamata olives but Jason is an olive hater unfortunately : (

So you prepare all your ingredients and saute them with olive oil in a pan, adding them in the order they appear in the list. It's always a good idea to saute garlic first and to leave the basil until the sauce is almost done to preserve it's flavor. Once all your ingredients are prepared it only takes about 20 mins to cook. Then just layer the sauce and the eggplant on your plate and enjoy! Accompanied by a simple salad, a good crusty bread and a nice glass of wine, Jay and I agreed that this was way better than anything meat-free we could have found in Pittsburgh. I will probably make this sauce again soon, although I might use zucchini to change it up, or just as a pasta sauce, or maybe even to eat by itself, it's that good and that simple!

I also made a killer strawberry-raspberry-rhubarb crisp for dessert, but I will save my love for rhubarb for another post!