I don't think I've ever bought an eggplant before. I've had eggplant parmesan, of course, but it's just not a vegetable that makes it onto my grocery list very often. But this week we had two that we needed to learn what to do with (see: farm share, point of).

On Tuesday, I found a recipe online involving eggplant, cabbage, fresh mint, fresh parsley, and onion. I had every one of those ingredients. The mint was from a coworker, not the farm, but everything else was farm share food sitting in my kitchen. Unfortunately, having all the ingredients on hand does not mean that the recipe will be good. (Shocking, I know) This turned out similar to my last cabbage-from-the-internet recipe. Sort of... eh.

I chopped the red cabbage, onion, and eggplant (just onion on top of eggplant shown) and cooked it with canned diced tomatoes with their juice and herbs and spices. The results look very pretty:
But it's just not that flavorful. We served it over rice and we've had it for dinner and a couple of lunches (it made a LOT), but it's definitely not a recipe I'll be trying again. It was just sort of boring.

However, to redeem the evening: more pain de mie! This time I split the dough into two loaf pans and eyeballed the baking time. The loaves were not perfectly shaped because they didn't fill the pans fully. Next time I'll give them a little more rise time and shape them to better fill the pan and hopefully not rise with lumps.
But the crust was a pretty golden color and the crumb was light and moist. And it is so fantastic with our LAST jar of freezer jam. (I'm sad about that. Have I mentioned that I love the freezer jam?)
Last night, we had another eggplant to contend with and this time Kyle grilled it. I'd been lobbying for grilled eggplant all week and last night he had enough time to do it (while I did much laundry). He doctored eggplant slices with olive oil and salt and pepper (from the grill cookbook that we highly recommend) and threw them on the grill.

How pretty are those? They were great--especially fresh off the grill. The texture was perfect and the seasoning was just right. The skin was a little tough, but necessary to hold them together. Kyle discarded his as he ate them; I ate mine.

Along with the eggplant slices we had burgers from the farm share topped with a pat of brie and the 3 lonely new potatoes that I missed last week somehow. So do you have any other eggplant suggestions? We didn't need appetizers last night (we needed dinner) but these grilled eggplant wraps with goat cheese from The Kitchn are calling my name. Clearly grilled is my favorite right now, but I'm open to other ideas. We get new stuff today!