I remember the day when my love affair with eggplant began.
This is a lousy inaugural sentence for the following reasons:
a) My relationship with eggplant is not a love affair. If it were love, I would not eat eggplants, I would kiss them goodnight or take them fishing. The things I do to eggplants could be best represented in a medieval torture manual. (Because I’m sure that people wrote detailed treatises on torture back then. On human parchment. IN BLOOD.)
b) My determination to eat eggplant as often as possible has no origin. I was raised eating eggplant and at some point during my childhood I decided that it was my favorite food. To this day, every time I am in a grocery store, I buy an eggplant. Especially if it has an eggplant weenie.
c) Lists must contain three items.
So perhaps I’d better start by determining why my enthusiasm for eggplant is so boundless. Eggplant is mushy, stringy, sometimes bitter, sometimes tough, full of seeds – and raw eggplant is more like foam insulation than vegetable. But when cooked properly, eggplant has the most heavenly creamy taste. It absorbs other flavors without relinquishing its own. It can be prepared in too many ways to count. It’s used in cuisines across the globe – Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Russian, Italian, French, Greek, Turkish, Middle Eastern, North African, et al. More than any other ingredient I know, eggplant is a window into the cuisines of the world.
On this blog I’ll present cooking tips, botany, recipes (both from trusty cookbooks as well as recipes I’ve invented or adapted), photographs, anecdotes, and eggplant-related Chicago restaurant reviews. I have two goals in mind: to make my readers salivate, and to get more people cooking and appreciating eggplant for the wonder-vegetable (or fruit, actually) that it is.
Stay posted, fellow auberginophiles!
