SUSTAINABLE LIVING
What I Did with All the Eggplant
Finding ways to use my farm box
I have a love-hate relationship with eggplant. I love to eat it. I hate having to salt it and drain it and pat it dry before cooking with it. It makes all those 30-minute meal recipes take so much longer than 30 minutes.
So while I love the idea of cooking with eggplant more often — I’ve found a way to make it taste like pizza that my kiddo really likes — in practice it’s not in my regular rotation of meals.
But I found myself with two weeks’ worth of long, skinny eggplants and felt bad about the couple that were already ready for the compost bin*. Whatever I was going to cook had to be easy and had to be a side dish that could be used with more than one meal because I already had a meal plan** for the week and these eggplants had to be out of my kitchen ASAP.
I googled “garlicky eggplant.” I sauté stuff in garlic all the time. Garlicky eggplant would pair well with the sweet and spicy tofu I planned for the main course that night and could pair with any other number of flavors. I didn’t want to do any of the recipes that had an actual sauce because that would add time to my cooking plus make the eggplant less versatile.
There were no recipes for exactly what I had in mind, but I got a few ideas for how to cook the eggplant. I decided to slice it, salt it, and let it drain. But I really should have patted it dry more thoroughly before adding it to hot oil. It popped and sizzled all over the place. I cooked one side, flipped the slices over, cooked the other side. This had to be done in several batches because not all the slices would fit in the pan at once. Several pieces burned (it’s classier if you say it’s charred).
After the eggplant was cooked, I added about 10 cloves’ worth of roughly chopped garlic to the pan, and put back in all the eggplant slices. By then they were mushy enough to all fit. I moved the garlic and eggplant around the pan just long enough for the garlic to cook. With such hot oil I’m sure it took less than a minute.
Once the smoke cleared, the eggplant tasted fine. The extra garlic did go well with the flavors of the sauce for the tofu. The next day I ate the rest of the leftover eggplant with feta, tomatoes, and basil, proving the versatility of cooking simply with garlic.
Next time — because there will be a next time, for the next few weeks at least — I might roast it, though, and put it under the broiler for a few seconds to get the char. Frying it was a messy, time-consuming pain in the bottom.
Not every cooking venture is going to be perfect, even for some of the easiest things. But most of the time it will be perfectly edible.
*Speaking of composting:
**My meal plans are usually deciding on a three or four main courses and then coming up with sides on the fly based on what’s available.
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