i have come to accept this truth: i do not like eggplant. i love it sitting on my counter like a still life painting, i love its shiny purple skin against the yellow lemons, green tomatilla, red tomatoes… but i do not love to eat it.

our CSA‘s eggplant fields runneth over, and every week there is a huge, beautiful eggplant (or two, or three) waiting to grace our kitchen counters and confound the cooks within. the first one we let decorate the counter until it sagged, and it was time to go straight into the compost bin. the next couple of weeks we didn’t even let the eggplant come home with us, just slipped the eggplant into the community swap box, trading it for more potatoes or (gasp) even extra zucchini.*

but somehow another one made it into our kitchen last week, and so yesterday we decided it was time to give eggplant one more fair go. i recently discovered Smitten Kitchen (thanks Jacob, for the link to the sweet corn cakes recipe, and the introduction to the lovely SK), and they were featuring a eggplant bruschetta recipe. the pictures were gorgeous. how could the end result not be delicious?

i know that the key to a well-prepared eggplant is to salt it and let the bitterness drain out (sign number one that you might not want to eat this food: it requires salting to remove the nasty bitterness before it’s edible. you know what else is like that? lutefisk). so we made the eggplant dish, after following what are certainly the most gratuitous directions on how to salt an eggplant ever written:

(excerpt:)
“I feel protective of the wet rounds in the sink. They’re not as spongy and hardy as they once were; they feel tender, softer, and much more vulnerable. Some have slight tears in the center where the flesh has constricted. I’ve put them through salt therapy and they’ve emerged sweeter, but in need of greater care. I rinse and pat each one gently with paper towels, arranging the dried rounds into neat lines on a sheet pan. They’re ready to be cooked now.”

the results: meh. we ate it, but as ben pointed out half way though, it would have been a lot better if we’d just swapped the eggplant for some tomatoes and made a bruschetta out of that.

and so with that, i’m throwing in the towel on eggplant. certainly with regard to cooking it myself. now sure, if you dip slices of eggplant in egg and bread crumbs, pan fry it, cover it in melted cheese and red sauce, it’ll be delicious. but as ben pointed out, the only part of eggplant parmesan he doesn’t really care for is the eggplant. why not just go to Chili’s, order mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce, and call a spade a spade? same goes for baba ganoush**. it’s pretty tasty, but the chunks of eggplant are the worst part. also, i’m pretty sure it’s more work than i want to undertake. not when there are complex and exotic pastries that i could be learning to make instead.

the verdict is: life is too short to spend time trying to make eggplant palatable. oh, and don’t even get me started on peas.

* logic: I can hide excess zucchini in such treats as sweet, chocolate chip and orange zest-laced “bread” (really: cake). i do not know how to hide an eggplant inside a dessert and call it breakfast.

** baba ganoush, baba ghannouj, baba ghannoug…take your pick.