I came, I saw, I cooked eggplant

So I've been absent for a few days of blogging. I could blame school work, which would be the usual suspect. However, this has not been the case. I've been cooking more eggplants than you could beat with a stick. I stopped counting at 18 purple globes of bitter doom. And tonight was my final play. If I didn't get it tonight, I fully intended to relegate Eggplant to the "mystery bin", an imaginary bin where I place foods that I just cannot cook to an edible condition. And truthfully, I tried every cooking method known to modern mankind. I baked, fried, steamed (which was a horrid disaster), grilled, and burned a multitude of eggplant.

Tonight, in desperation, I turned to roasting. And all I can say is "BOOYAH BABY I GOT IT!" After consulting with my family and gleaning a few tricks from Grandma Rose's arsenal of eggplant cookery, I finally cooked my first eggplant properly. And it was so very simple, I felt like a dumbass for not getting it like this sooner.

To put it in perspective, the closest I had come thus far to edible eggplant involved skinning, slicing, purging, soaking, breading, frying, and broiling. The end result tasted like a mass of cheese with red sauce with a bitter-eggplant filler. Bitter eggplant tastes a lot like an ashtray in seltzer water. The point is that even after trying all kinds of steps to make eggplant taste like, well, NOT eggplant, tonight was so much better. All I did was:

1. cut an eggplant lengthwise (a critical difference, I'd previously been slicing them into rounds)

2. score the flesh with a knife and salt everything well to purge for 45 mins.

3. Toss them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet and bake for an hour or so in a roasty-toasty oven.

4. toss on cheese and some herbs (fresh thyme) and reap the benefits.

So simple, so easy, and it was really good. Very bright and perky, slightly smokey, a little oily, but pleasantly so, and the texture was soft, but it held together quite well.
I served it with another Italian classic. Spaghetti Carbonara. I went with this one becasue carbonara is basically a culinary trump card. It's unsmoked bacon (pancetta or procuitto), egg, some cream, cheese and copius amounts of black pepper. It can make literally ANYTHING taste good.

In making the carbonara, I was fortunate in that I could not find any unsmoked bacon anywhere, so I went with a top quality smoked variety. And boy did I hit pay dirt from that little faux pas. It turns out that the smokey flavor of the bacon melds beautifully with the bite of the eggplant, and the creamy, savory sauce tied the meal together beautifully. Fresh thyme and basil added right at the end imparted a fresh and clean aroma.

I am so pleased with this eggplant experiment, and now that I have a solid way of cooking them (at least the globe variety), I am actually looking forward to things like poor man's caviar, iraqi eggplant and lamb stew, and maybe another go at the eggplant marquis dish , eggplant parmesan.

For now though, I think I'll find something to cook that is a little less ... purple.

Until next time, I bid you all Good Eating.