Rich, Red, and Roasty (or: how I stopped mucking around and started actually gardening and boy is it hard)

This is the longest I've gone without Aubergeniusing, for no particular reason except I'm ahem *trying to finish writing a book.* I wish I could say the book is about eggplants.

Two topics follow: 

1) Eggplants Roasted with Turkish Red Pepper Paste, hereafter abbreviated as RRR (Rich, Red, and Roasty). 

Crafty: grew the 'gines, threw the plate

2) Gardening. Because the eggplants pictured came from my garden and I'm a proud mama. This started as "I grew an eggplant!" and morphed, for better or worse, into a small essay about what we learn from community gardens.

This was my garden haul yesterday, and hopefully as a fellow Aubergenius your eye will be drawn to those eggplants on the bottom. You might notice some of them look like bright orange peppers. Those are a variety called Turkish orange and they are abundant, sweet, and retain that cool orange hue when cooked. 

Lately I've been playing around with Turkish red pepper paste, also called biber salçasi, which comes in a big round jar at any store that sells Middle Eastern products. Even though the one I bought says "hot," it's hardly spicy, which means you can use a lot of it. The result is a rich, sweet pepper flavor that will turn your oil dark red, especially when paired with tomato paste. I bought my first jar while following a recipe for a white bean stew in red sauce, and eventually I started coating things in it and roasting them. Among the best results was new potatoes coated in pepper paste, salt, pepper, oregano, and lemon zest in lots of olive oil, with a whole head of garlic and several onions in the middle of the tray. Part of my garden haul yesterday turned into this: green beans with a similar treatment, this time coated with a pinch of cumin seeds, pepper paste mixed with a little tomato paste and loosened with water, oregano and salt, then finished with white wine vinegar after cooking:

Credit due: this is loosely modeled on a Bon Appetit recipe that I couldn't read because of a paywall, and regardless they used Harissa while I think the Turkish stuff is tastier. It's milder so you can use more of it. Who wants a sprinkle of pepper flavor when you can have an explosion?

The eggplants were cooked likewise, albeit salted and sweated first. Here's the summary:

RRR Eggplants

Ingredients

as many eggplants as your garden allows, cut into 1/2 inch slices

Turkish red pepper paste

tomato paste

cumin seeds

white wine vinegar

olive oil

salt

garlic, either a couple cloves coarse chopped or a full head if you want extra

optional: oregano

Method

Salt the eggplants and let them sweat 15 minutes before wiping off all the salt. While eggplants are sweating, make the pepper sauce. How much pepper sauce you make depends on how much eggplant you have. You'll want an even, thin coating on there. Mix together pepper paste and tomato paste in a 2-1 ratio (that is, half as much tomato paste) along with some water to loosen it. Add chopped garlic to the sauce, OR consider roasting a whole garlic bulb with the top cut off and oil drizzled on top. Coat eggplants in a mix of pepper paste and plenty of olive oil, then sprinkle with salt and roast at 350°F, flipping once, until soft and nicely browned. Remove from oven and sprinkle with a little white wine vinegar. Eat wrapped up in a flatbread, on a salad, as a side dish, or just by itself. 

Tigergines

Coated and ready for the oven.

Soft, roasty, SUPER flavorful.

If you take anything away from this post, it's that a giant jar of pepper paste does indeed belong in your fridge.

Part of what's exciting about this: since the last time I aubergined, I've become a gardener. Now commenceth Part 2: 

Community Gardens: On Rooting Where You Are.

I got a community garden plot last year and tapped into my salt of the earth side (i.e., repressing the lilylivered soft-handed city slicker). Community gardens are great places to meet folks you'd never otherwise meet, learn about gardening from others' tips, and comfort yourself that everyone is getting the same damn fungus in their cuke roots and it's not your fault. What's not always easy about community gardens, I learned the hard way, is the soil. My first plot last year had clay soil as hard as cement and I had to rent a rototiller to break it up. Even the tiller struggled. It made grinding noises and burrowed into one spot like a badger, making me lift the whole thing to advance it with blades whirring at my ankles. While tilling inexpertly, I discovered that the soil was also packed full of giant river rocks and mysterious pieces of plastic trash. Fishing out the trash and the rocks and the grass rhizomes left a crick in my back that lasted for a week. (The rocks, while annoying at the time, later made a beautiful pathway.) And while dashing the soil and its poor earthworms into pieces, thinking I looked so hip and intense in my wifebeater, I got the worst sunburn of my life. The kind that inches you palpably closer to skin cancer. Live and learn.

That first year my garden was shockingly prolific. I ended up with a cucumber castle taller than myself with so many dozens of fruits on it that no amount of gifting could keep up. I had a wall of pole beans, a potato patch, *purple sweet potatoes* (they turned out heavenly!), buckets of tomatoes, peppers, beets, squashes both summer and winter, and on and on. The eggplants were the only plants that didn't produce much, just a few nibbles. They are finicky creatures. They crave heat, like all the nightshades, but their leaves are delicious to every pest and they end up like lace. When they do produce, the fruits are rarely substantial. You have to harvest them before, or shortly after, the skin turns matte. Otherwise they'll go bitter, which they might well do anyway, just out of spite. 

First garden, planted up and ready to junglify.

Last year's first finicky eggplant.

That first community garden was also an interesting experience that took me out of Eugene's university bubble. Right next to the garden is what's called a "Safe Spot," a tiny-house program for those getting back on their feet. On my first day in the garden I found a surprising sight across the fence: a parked school bus with a goat grazing beside it. (Yes, I did feed the goat yummy things through the fence.) Safe Spot is an amazing program; not everyone in Eugene is as lucky as its residents. Coincidentally this garden was also located down the street from Eugene's largest tent city under the highway. I drove past it every few days during the second Covid summer when the eviction moratorium expired. It was tragic to see the boundaries of the city swell, spilling over from the underpass into the surrounding neighborhood and eventually up to the garden itself. Even when we have tremendous empathy for the houseless, and advocate for housing reform, it can feel disorienting to find oneself in the midst of a tent city. Some of those camping in front of the garden left escalating refuse by the gate. One day, when I was picking tomatoes at dusk, a man walked into the garden with an odd gait that seemed under the influence of something; I realized with a jolt that he held two large kitchen knives, one in each hand. I left swiftly without making sudden movements. The next day I found that several structures had been pulled down. 

There in Eugene's roughest area I met wonderful fellow gardeners who made miracles out of that tough soil. A family from Hawai'i cultivated two or three huge plots in a row, building glorious flower beds and an arching squash support with a homemade wooden bench underneath. I learned so much about gardening every time I offered them some of my copious cukes. Down the way, an exchange student from Japan made the most elegant structures out of found branches, working with their contours to create a wall of tomato vines, squash supports, bean poles, all with a natural lilt. The back half of the garden belongs to Huerto de la Familia, a nonprofit that offers gardens and business creation training to Latino families. One family turned their whole plot into walls of corn and tomatillos. 

All of this led me to an interesting realization: community gardens are a way to root where you are. They teach you not only to put down literal roots but to fully encounter the place where you live. 

Last year I moved to a different neighborhood and switched over to a garden within biking distance. This one, too, puts me in contact with people I might never normally meet. The soil here has its own challenges: it is darker, richer, devoid of rocks, but prone to flooding that leaves the garden under inches of water for weeks in the spring. Here everyone builds up their gardens into mounds, fighting the elements together with shared strategies passed down to the newcomers. My garden is near the gate, and I'm convinced it's the best spot because every person who enters says hello. We introduce ourselves and talk about squash bugs or covert composting or a variety of leafy green that's doing well in winter. These are little friendships that live only in the garden, and for the most part I don't know anything about these people, which is a strange realization because we have a certain kind of bond. 

Welcome to your new garden! Here's 400 square feet of hard clay soil packed with grass rhizomes. If you jump up and down on this broadfork and fall backwards with your full body weight you might be able to till it 6 inches at a time. Have at it!

After tilling and before the rains: a mighty amount of work erased by spring flooding. 

After a second tilling, walkways put down, planted up, ready to go.

Got lotsa compliments on this diagonal arrangement. Rectangles are boring.

Back in June before the tomatoes became giant monsters with vines flailing all over the place. 

People tend to show garden pictures like this cornucopia in ways that conceal the sweat, the sunburn, the eternal fight against pests, the dirt under the nails. Behind every cornucopia is labor. It's a good thing to remember while we roam the grocery (commodity fetishism cough). That opens up a can of worms that is far outside the scope of an eggplant blog. 

Instagram ready. Sweat photoshopped out.