Welcome to Eugene!

Hello world, I moved again. I now live in Eugene, Oregon. It is a city of eggplants.

First, I should mention that Eugene is... quirky. To say the least. Life here is quite normal for a while, then suddenly it becomes Portlandia without the satire. Every time something odd happens, people respond with a resounding, "Welcome to Eugene!" So the following is a list of statements I have uttered in the last few weeks, and for full effect, please welcome me to Eugene after each one:

• Tempeh again?!
• How long did you spend at the mouth of the Ganges?
• To avoid touching the teacher’s face I just drew a field of beards.
• She said her name came to her in a dream.
• [Google search] “chicken noises are they happy”
• Everyone got a headache from that unlabeled wine.
• The duplex is pretty nice but the landlady needs total silence for her tarot readings.
• You want to *run* up the butte?
• Ooh can I please have one of your scobies?
• Moss fail.

AND ABOVE ALL:

• So all this produce is local? 

Yes, friends, this is the land of agricultural cornucopia. Everyone gardens. The farmer's market is yuuuuuge. I have been cooking so many eggplants I haven't bothered to take photos of half of them.

I made a pretty solid Turkish eggplant salad out of these grilled pieces and I didn't even photograph it. So copious are the aubergines.

Tonight I roasted farmer's market eggplants, tomatoes, rutabagas, rosemary, garlic, shallots, peppers. All locally grown. My thought was, if it's a high-quality product, I should just let it be. So I roasted it with olive oil, rosemary, balsamic vinegar, and salt, and sprinkled goat cheese on top. The only creativity involved, if you could even call it that, is stuffing garlic pieces down into slits in the eggplant's surface, then loading tomatoes on top to keep it from burning. 

Burned garlic is the worst.

Normally I do something more interesting. But the veggies are so flavorful that there's no need.

Eugene, land of home gardens.

My first taste of the city, before I established myself enough to roast things, came in the form of two eggplant dishes in local restaurants. First a salty basil and fermented bean dish from Ta Ra Rin, a Thai place.

Salty, slightly sweet, slightly fishy, super spicy. 

But what really takes the cake is the Szechuan food at Kung Fu Bistro. This place is unreal. Their "fish-flavored" eggplant (fear not, no fish involved) tastes unlike any I've had before. It was sweet, salty, tangy, garlicky, gingery, chili-ey, also loaded with fermented beans, and somehow different from any eggplant I've had in Chinese joint. What the heck do they put in there?

Tastes even better than it looks, and it looks like heaven, so... 

I got a dose of those woodear mushrooms I was craving weeks ago. Wut.

New aubergines appear daily in my life now, so prepare for one of two eventualities:

1) a major revitalization of this blog

2) me stuffing my face all the time and too busy stuffing to take photos, whoops, sorreeee