Eggplant Experiment

Last week for my calzone stuffing, I bought two eggplants. One went into the calzone, and the other sat on the counter for six days. Eggplant skin is weird; it gets loose and shrively with age, which doesn't exactly encourage you to use it up. I meant to make something with it for my lunch, but cold eggplant sounds pretty unappetizing. So it continued to sit.

Tonight, being Friday, I decidede to live it up and cook that eggplant, if it wasn't completely disgusting inside. But it wasn't. My new Taste of Uganda cookbook has some eggplant recipes, but the one I wanted to make requires a tomato. We have no tomatoes. So I decided to try to imitate Laurie Tricarico's eggplant "recipe" - I think she dipped thin slices in something that looked like sugar, and then cooked them in a frying pan. (She was making up the recipe herself, since eggplant was one of the vegatables plentiful at the market that time. It tasted good, giving me a good impression of eggplant, which I'd never really tried before then.)

Breaded eggplant sounded good, so I dipped thin de-skinned slices in flour and salt. Kind of a lot of salt, actually. Then I fried them crisp and firm in a little bit of oil, so they were kind of like fries. They smelled oddly like pancakes; sweeter than I expected. Actually, I've come to the conclusion that I just really like the smell of eggplant, raw or cooked.

The eggplant fries were exactly what I hoped - crisp and tasty. It was unfortunate that I put quite so much salt on them, though. I had to eat slices of plums in between eggplant slivers to get rid of the over saltiness. Oops!

So next time maybe I'll actually follow a recipe. (If you have any, please pass them on!) But it was fun...