Chillin and Grillin

Madness. Sheer madness.

This is a fairly accurate description of my life in the past few months, which explains the dearth of eggplant entries for the last long period. It's not as though I have more than about five regular readers, though, so the cumulative disappointment must be pretty minimal.

While I haven't been posting lately, I HAVE been accumulating photos. Not only this, I'm departing for Germany and Austria this Monday (AAAAAUGH so many preparations), and thus the time is now to generate a massive Aubergenius photo-dump. It remains to be seen whether Germany and Austria contain notable eggplants, and whether blog posts will appear over the course of my trip.

DID YOU KNOW?
It's grilling season.

I myself don't have a grill, and therefore grilled my first eggplants a few weeks ago using a friend's barbecue.

I was excited to grill these little baby eggplants.  They're just so cute.

 Unfortunately, grilling does in fact involve a learning curve. I started by grilling these various skewers, slabs of zucchini, barbecue-marinated tempeh, and eggplants doused in what I thought was a generous amount of olive oil. It turns out, however, that it's NEVER enough oil. The eggplants turned out rubbery and spongy, even after they'd grilled to the point of char, and the few that tasted good were the ones from the bottom of the bowl. Later on I tried slathering a few with barbecue sauce, but they were equally disappointing.

Not only that, but the slices were so thin that we lost about half of them through the grate in an attempt to turn them over. (We didn't have tongs, i.e., the meat-eaters got meat-juices on them and we had to use a spatula instead. Whooops.)

Suffice it to say that I need more grilling practice. But I think that they would have turned out perfectly if I had used enough oil.

More posts a-comin' up!