Rosa bianca eggplant, beets, carrots, sweet peppers, button squash roasted with lots of oregano, and steamed green beans, topped with a garlic yoghurt dressing, all of it bar the powdered milk used to make the yoghurt with about 10 steps of food miles. There is something very decadent about dinner shopping like this.
I picked a couple of eggplants on my picking walk, and there were at least another three or four needing to be picked this week. It had to be eggplant for dinner. These barbeque skewers turned out so well that I had to write out the recipe even if just to remember it myself, for next eggplant glut, next week.
I go on a picking walk most days, picking what needs to be picked, and then thinking about what to do with it (and what else I need to pick from the herbs and perennials to go with it). What’s for dinner is always led by what needs to be used. This has the useful side effect that what needs to be used is pretty nearly always what’s at the…
Sometimes I think we overelaborate recipes. Last night I made a Middle Eastern style stuffed eggplants for dinner, and it was good, but when I compare it with tonight’s Pasta alla Norma, I think it was over-elaborated. In-season produce needs so little. Pasta alla Norma does justice to eggplants – so good, so much better than you would think for something that simple.
The low-light photo doesn’t do it justice. Usually I don’t post something the first time I make it, but this will be the last time for the season too. Enough pickles on the shelf, and no tahini in the pantry for baba ganoush, and a batch of chick peas cooked for felafel. So I tried something different. And now there are no more eggplants till next year to do it…
Peeled, the red eggplants work in just about any eggplant recipe. They are a bit more bitter and I tend to pick them green, just as the colour turns for most recipes. Unpeeled and fully ripe, they work brilliantly in an Indian style eggplant pickle.
I’m very proud of these. Eggplants are one of my difficult crops. In my garden they are prone to attack by flea beetles. The flea beetles themselves are a nuisance – they chew holes in the leaves – but not critical. But they spread virus diseases and the nightshade family (that eggplants belong to) is very prone to virus diseases. And I live in an area where wild tobacco (Solanum…