Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

This is new territory for me. I’ve never cooked an eggplant, and I’ve only ever tasted it in that dip, Baba Ganoush. But hey, anything is good if it is roasted. My supermarket had exactly three eggplants sitting on the shelf. I went with the nicest looking, smallest one (about a pound), because I’ve read that large eggplants can be bitter. My eggplant felt kind of like a soft balloon.

To prepare the eggplant, you cut it up into 1-inch cubes, drizzle the cubes with olive oil, salt and pepper and roast them at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes. Pretty standard instructions for roasting vegetables.

In the oven, the eggplant cubes pretty much collapsed (after soaking up all the olive oil) and stuck to my pan. Visually, they were unappetizing, and I found the flavor of them to be bland with a very soft texture. Except for the skin. The skin was kind of tough. Clark’s instructions don’t say anything about peeling the eggplant, so I didn’t. At the table, I wondered out loud if I should have taken the skin off. Bryan, who was poking at his eggplant suspiciously, immediately had to go to the internet to find out if I had poisoned him.

In the end, we both decided that we didn’t like the eggplant. Bryan thought it was bland and had no flavor, and I didn’t like the too soft texture. The only saving grace was the green goddess dressing (review coming up next) that we drizzled over the roasted eggplant.