Eggplant! Glorious Eggplant!

Eggplant is a food I pretty much only eat when it is flooding out of our garden.  The limited seasonality of this food makes me look forward to it so much every summer.   That time is now!

Fresh from the garden: peas, white eggplant, purple eggplant, hot peppers, sweet peppers.

Oh!My!Goodness! I love a tender, melt-in-your-mouth eggplant.  When they go from fresh-picked-to-cooked in under an hour it is just out of this world.

Matt's Eggplant Parm over macaroni.

We're growing two varieties of the slender Asian eggplants--white and purple skinned--but we have a few plants that produce the more common deep purple Italian ones, too.

A fresh picked beauty.

While Eli was visiting, we cooked up an Indian Feast that included cashew-stuffed eggplants since he said he didn't know if he'd ever eaten eggplant before.  This is one of our favorite ways to cook eggplant and we've made it a handful of times already this summer.

Breaded and baked rounds of eggplant--step one in the exquisite Eggplant Parm.

Matt recently modified an America's Test Kitchen recipe for Eggplant Parm that was nothing short of incredible.  We both basically moaned our way through dinner, it was so gall dang tasty.  

...more Eggplant Parm.

Eggplants also make a fabulous addition to the already fabulous Caribbean Au Gratin.  I just polished off the last slice for lunch, in fact.

Caribbean leftovers!

...and there is so much more to come!  I picked more than a pound for dinner last night and the plants are still loaded.

Long live the eggplant bender!!!