Eggplant Glorious Eggplant!

Our eggplant varieties are growing in full force. We have about 400 plants and five varieties. We're growing the basic Italian globes, white globes, rosa biancas and two different Japanese varieties. Most of you are probably most familiar with the classic Italian globes. These types are tasty and they are what most grocery stores offer. They are also the type that most people use when making eggplant Parmesan. However, this particular variety is also the most bitter of the ones we are growing. This is why most recipes call for salting the eggplant prior to cooking it. The other varieties we are growing are much sweeter in comparison (especially the Japanese eggplant) and do not require the salting process. If you'd like to learn more about these different types of eggplant and you'd like to take a look at some tasty recipes, please check out the I Love Eggplant! website.

Pictured below are the classic Italian globe (the larger variety) and the two types of Japanese eggplant we're growing.

Of course, this is the white variety (sweeter than the classic globe).

And this is the rosa bianca variety.

If the I Love Eggplant! site doesn't give you enough ideas on what to do with your eggplant, let me offer you a few more suggestions. Last week (July 26th) was Ben's birthday. For his birthday I made chocolate zucchini cake and for dinner, moussaka. Moussaka takes quite a while to make (almost 3 hours including prep and bakind time) - but it is well worth it! Here's a link to the recipe I used. I did not salt the eggplant. Also, I think that while the breading was tasty, I could definitely forgoe it in the future so as to cut down on the prep time. I think next time I'm just going to sprinkle bread crumbs into the mix. Finally, since we did not have ground lamb on hand, I used ground beef. While lamb is better for this recipe, the spices in the beef worked well (and since I couldn't find all the necessary spices the recipe called for, I used a pumpkin pie spice mix we had - which also worked well). 

A much easier way to make an eggplant dish is to make the classic Baba Ganoush dish. You simply roast the eggplant, scoop it out and puree it with the other ingredients. You will need to get tahini (sesame paste) to make this dish. If you're not familiar with it, here's some info. Here's a link to a particularly tasty recipe (I don't think the parsley, cilantro or chili powder are essential - but you definitely need the rest of the ingredients).

Finally, the Japanese eggplant varieties lend themselves to easy stir fry. We like to eat them in a green coconut curry. The Italian varieties are great for grilling.

I hope I've been able to help y'all get the creative juices flowing. Please do submit any recipes you enjoy or any other comments regarding the recipes or info I've posted here.

Thanks for stopping by! And for a little fun, I'll leave you with a couple images of some eggplant critters :).

Eggplant penguins

Eggpant chicken