How to roast eggplant? Just dice it up, toss with a little olive oil, and pop it in the oven. This healthy way to cook eggplant is so simple, yet so flavorful.
When it comes to food I often tend to go overboard. I serve dinner salads that guests assume are meant to feed the entire table. I
bake enormous cookies. I currently have 14 jars of organic peanut butter in my pantry.
More than once I've been declared the "highest grocery receipt of the month" at Trader Joe's, although in my defense the store is 200 miles away and I only get to shop there a couple of times a year. The checkers say things like, "Wow, you must really like cheese," and "Just how many cats do you have?" When they raise an eyebrow at the twelve pounds of organic carrots, I mention
our seven donkeys.
So it wasn't surprising that when I moved from a tiny urban lot in Northern California to a sprawling Missouri farm back in 1994, my organic kitchen garden grew from around 60 square feet to about 10,000. I planted something like 174 different kinds of herbs, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, almost all of them started from seed. The gardening magazine editor who asked me to send him a complete planting list called my efforts "ambitious."
I've scaled back since then.
I'd never grown—or even cooked—eggplant before moving to Missouri, but the 20 plants in my first year's garden
(what was I thinking?) rewarded me with a bumper crop. I ended up turning the majority of my harvest into caponata during a
several month long canning rampage, but when I called the 800 canning hotline number for processing directions, I was sternly informed that I couldn't put up jars of caponata.
"Oh, yes I can!" I said, hanging up and taking my chances. (I lived.)
It would have been easier on everyone if I'd just roasted all that eggplant, which is what I did with the 15 beautiful dark purple ones I recently bought from our
Amish neighbors.
Recipe below. . .
