Well, I promised you culinary failures as well as successes. I am a woman of my word.
The eggplant and I have never understood each other. My mother didn’t cook with it. My grandparents only pickled it, and everyone always raved about it, but it honestly never looked appetizing to me in my youth, so I never tried it. I used to even pick it off my garlic bread when a stray strand from my grandfather’s garlic bread topping secret recipe wandered onto my piece. I’ve never bought an eggplant because I never knew what to do with it. I’ve never ordered it in a restaurant, but it has crossed my plate from a hot antipasto appetizer combo. It was okay. Once, I had a divine version of eggplant parmigiana — it was free at a tasting for a party I was having. It was so good I couldn’t believe it was eggplant and I almost put it on the menu. And that’s the sum total of my eggplant experience.
One of the reasons I joined the CSA was to force myself out of my vegetable rut and start trying new things. And, in mid-August, along came my old foe eggplant. Quite a lot of eggplant. The first week we got it in our harvest, it was more eggplant than I had ever eaten in my entire life put together. What the hell was I going to do with all this eggplant.
Like so many misguided conquerors before me, I mistook initial victory for total vanquishment. My eggplant chip idea turned out great. I thought, “HAHA! Eggplant, I HAVE YOU NOW!” I once heard someone respond to this type of situation in the human context by stating, “Fear not, they will rally.” The eggplant rallied.
My sister also belongs to the CSA. She made an absolutely divine eggplant parm with the harvest. Really, that good. Restaurant quality. She brought me a small piece, I ate it, I wanted more. One of the keys was slicing the eggplant very thin. So, I thought, I would take a recipe I’ve made 1000 times, tandoori chicken and onions, and reinvent it with this week’s harvest into tandoori chicken with eggplant, peppers, and onions. And, thinking I was clever, I made matchsticks with the eggplant so it would be thin. Cooked them up like I normally would, excited for the tandoori flavor. Took a bite and…BLECH!!! The flavor was okay. But the eggplant skin was inedible. Like spit it out inedible. Eating plastic inedible. Rookie mistake, I guess. It was no problem on the chips (perhaps because of the different cooking technique? the variety of eggplant?), but big problem here. So, I picked ’em all out of the dish. Lesson learned.
I’ll try to get my sister’s eggplant parm recipe for you.
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