Quarantine Cooking: A Mezze Lunch

In my quest to not waste food, I turned my grilled eggplant from another night into baba ghanoush with the addition of tahini, Meyer lemons and curly parsley into the Vita blender.

I pulsed with tiny additions of water, adjusting for texture because I wanted a coarse ground and salting to taste,

I've been inspired by late, watching David Chang's Ugly Delicious, and I was lucky to have a lot of the herbs already in my spice drawer and condiments from Dean's Produce:  Aleppo pepper, smoked Spanish paprika, Zhoug made of mint and cilantro, homemade hummus, homemade tzatziki, Greek feta, leftover Greek salad, and Spanish olive oil.

I chopped and added a bit more green bell pepper, red onion, cherry tomatoes, and Persian cucumbers and tossed the salad with red wine vinegar and olive oil.  

I topped the Greek salad with chunks of Greek feta (though French feta is my favorite of late)and sprinkled it with Dukkah, scooped hummus and tzatziki on the plate, sprinkling Aleppo pepper and chopped mint. I remembered to add the yellow bell peppers I had grilled the other night with the eggplant into the salad.

I had other pickles in my fridge and thought why not?  In go Tennessee hot pickled okra and artichoke hearts.

I then added a scoop of baba ghanous and topped it with the green Zhoug and topped the hummus with the red Shatta.  And remembered to dot with a two or three Kalamata olives.

You also gotta have a starch to scoop all these savory dollops, and this was the last of pita bread I bought at the Middle Eastern market that I wrapped in foil to go with instructions to heat it in a 400 degree oven for a few minutes

Next I embellished with more curly parsley and plastic wrapped and left it out on the counter for the platter to get to room temperature to heighten the flavors.  Oh!  I had forgotten, and so I had to lift the plastic and drizzle Spanish olive oil all over the individual mezze board for my neighbor, Cecilia.

And then it was time for me to partake of my own personal vegetarian mezze, and even without an alcoholic accompaniment because I supposed I could've partook of a glass of Chardonnay during this quarantine, I relished and rhapsodized over the taste and flavors of Lebanese and Syrian and Greek and Arabic and Egyptian cuisine.  Cecilia loved it too, and claimed the baba ghanoush was the best she ever tasted--and so I made her another mezze the next week.