Patrick harvested some beautiful produce this week.
Of course, the tomatoes were my lunch or dinner this week. But I decided to cook something I’d never prepared before with the eggplants for dinner last night. The mise en place of slicing and chopping the eggplant but mostly salting and blotting the vegetable of all its water took the most time. I chopped our softest tomatoes too, but merely salted and let them sit in their juices with chopped basil. I also sliced and minced fresh onion and garlic from the garden. And dinner took a while because after pan frying the eggplant until crispy (2 minutes per side), I then sautéed the minced onion and garlic in the olive oil, which I didn’t pour off from my cast iron, and then added all the chopped tomatoes and their liquid. Cooking the sauce took the longest as I waited for it to boil off all the water and let the vegetable and and aromatics get emulsified from all the olive oil. In the meantime, the eggplant stayed golden and crispy in a 225 degree oven while I also boiled bucatini for 8 minutes. Dinner ready! I wished I had not added the fried eggplant to the sauce directly which then sogged its crispiness and made it melt into more unctuousness, which was not a bad thing. I sprinkled more fresh basil and grated Parmesan atop of my plate. But next time (and there will be a next time because sogginess notwithstanding, Pasta alla Norma is delicious), I’ll sprinkle the fried eggplant atop the sauced noodles.
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