Diary of a Young Eggplant

Lately I've been a lazy eggplantophile. Every eggplant I buy gets automatically converted into roasted slices and only rarely elevated to an eggplant-tomato salad (at best). The creativity stops there. My latest slices were piled onto a flatbread -- and this was no homemade triumph of floury aprons, but just a blob of Trader Joe's pizza dough:

Pictured here with chipotle lentils and feta.

Tasty... but not especially inventive.

Sheer laziness aside, my cooking nonchalance marks an important turning point in my eggplant life. My priorities have shifted from consumption to production. My fire escape has now become a nursery for new generations of nightshades.

Poblano, tomatillo, san marzano, and... 

"Little Fingers." Because I teach piano. Isn't that precious.

My urban garden got off to a rough start. This year's spring in Chicago has been so miserably cold that the plants almost died their first night outdoors. I had to keep them inside, where they starved for sun and warmed themselves over the heat of my obsessive birthday-picnic cooking-extravaganza. (I made about 10 things. One of them was... tomato eggplant salad. My repertoire needs a boost.)

Our young hero: lacking sun, hoisted high away from the window to escape the cruel jaws of a noshy cat.

I couldn't help imagining some kind of Pixar movie where the outdoor plants and the indoor plants are forced into uncomfortable conversation. Very Finding Nemo. So the pothos is like, "hey Johnny, we've got company!" and the money plant is like "what are y'all doing on our block?" and the tomato is like "yeah dude, we're new on the block" and the tomatillo just blushes and curls a finger around its tendrils.

"It's ok, little guy. Just be patient. They'll come round."

Meanwhile, shit's going down at the windowsill.

"Psst. Who's that scary goth dude?"
"Shut up shut up! He's looking at us!"

As our young eggplant hero matures, I'll chart his growth in a kind of leafy Bildungsroman. Hopefully by the end of the summer, I'll have some little fingers to roast into tiny little slices and make a tiny little eggplant salad for a tiny hedgehog.