eggplant

I love eggplants in theory. They’re a gorgeous purple color, they’re delightfully smooth and oval, and my knife makes a very satisfying sound when slicing through them. I’d never had an eggplant before, so when my chiropractor offered me one that an Amish patient brought him I seized it and ran out the door before he changed his mind. I stashed it safely in my laptop bag, but when I took a particularly hard turn it rolled out and spent the rest of the drive rocking gently on the passenger side floorboard. That’s definitely not the worst thing that’s happened to a piece of food I was planning to eat (see: floor spinach), so I wasn’t fazed.

Amish eggplant is obviously superior to regular eggplant.

When I got home, I was presented with the dilemma of what, exactly, to do with my eggplant. I poked around on the internet for a while before deciding to slice it, bread it, and bake it — almost like a parmesan, but without the tomato sauce. (When you eat spaghetti as much as we do, you get sick of tomato sauce pretty quickly.) I sliced the eggplant as evenly as I could (not very) and then debated what to do with the lovely purple rind on the outside of each slice. One recipe I saw suggested you slice off the rind, while another one said you should leave them on … and, since the Dumbass Gourmet always defaults to the culinary path of least resistance, I left them on.

On a side note, how freaky is a sliced eggplant?

Was I supposed to seed this thing?

So I dipped ‘em in egg, rolled ‘em in breadcrumbs, and sprinkled ‘em with parmesan cheese, followed by a tanning session in the oven for about 10 minutes on each side. There was half a box of rigatoni in the cupboard, so I tossed it with some garlic and butter (after cooking it, of course — I’m not that dumbass-ish) as a side. Except it turns out all our dinner dishes were in the dishwasher, so I had to get creative with bread plates instead:

This is The Husband’s, obviously. The tomatoes make it look less grody.

So … eggplant. The Husband has never liked it but was willing to give it another shot, albeit tentatively. I was a little braver with my first bite — not that it mattered, because I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. The next day at lunch, my friend Jim said maybe I cooked it for too long, but it wasn’t mushy, just blah. It didn’t really taste like anything. I’m very sorry to say we didn’t finish it, because I hate to throw away perfectly good food. I know some of you out there love eggplant, so tell me — how do you prepare it? I’m not averse to giving it another try, but only if it actually tastes like something.

I’m totally psyched for dinner tonight. I’m going to make ask The Husband politely if he’ll make mashed potatoes, my favorite food of all time, to go with the chicken breasts and whatever random vegetable I dig out of the freezer. Corn, maybe? Happy eating!