Fall Vegetable Recipes: 4 New Eggplant Ideas From Food52.com

For the past year, Amanda Hesser, Merrill Stubbs and their team at Food52.com have been running weekly recipe contests, whittling down dozens of reader-submitted recipes on a given theme to a final two each week, with their readers voting for their favorite. The winning recipes each week will appear in forthcoming Food52 cookbooks. (See it all explained here).

Since Food52's readers submit so many fabulous recipes that can't all make the final cut each week, their editors pulled some of their fall vegetable favorites together for us, and all this month we'll be featuring them on HuffPostFood. Last week we showed you three great ideas for red peppers. This week: eggplant.

Coming up later in the month: a plethora of more great Food52 recipes for mushrooms, sweet potatoes and butternut squash.

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Purnima Garg's Eggplant and Tomato Curry

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Amanda & Merrill's Notes from Food52.com:

Japanese eggplant has firmer flesh than regular eggplant, which means it holds up when stewed. We're not sure if that's why luvcookbooks calls for this type, but it works really well here as you simmer slices of the eggplant with canned tomatoes, onion and a mix of spices, including cumin, mustard seeds, coriander and garam masala. Luvcookbooks has you toast the spices and brown the onion, which gives it a richness and sweetness that permeates the dish. Then you add the eggplant and tomatoes and cook them until the eggplant is tender. (You'll need to add water a few times to keep the pan from drying out.) In less than 20 minutes, you'll have a wonderful, fragrant dish that would be great with grilled lamb or roasted chicken. - A&M

Get the recipe here. Photo: Sarah Shatz

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Amanda & Merrill's Notes from Food52.com:

Japanese eggplant has firmer flesh than regular eggplant, which means it holds up when stewed. We're not sure if that's why luvcookbooks calls for this type, but it works really well here as you simmer slices of the eggplant with canned tomatoes, onion and a mix of spices, including cumin, mustard seeds, coriander and garam masala. Luvcookbooks has you toast the spices and brown the onion, which gives it a richness and sweetness that permeates the dish. Then you add the eggplant and tomatoes and cook them until the eggplant is tender. (You'll need to add water a few times to keep the pan from drying out.) In less than 20 minutes, you'll have a wonderful, fragrant dish that would be great with grilled lamb or roasted chicken. - A&M

Get the recipe here.

Photo: Sarah Shatz

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Comments

[deweydecimal]

07:46 PM on 10/24/2010

In mirza ghasemi or pan fried and dipped in a nice soy sauce.

[TwoGayGuys]

04:11 PM on 10/21/2010

WE LOVE EGGPLANT! Check out our eggplant recipes at http://www.youtube.com/thetwogayguys

[Casa-Giardino]

02:56 PM on 10/21/2010

Stuffed eggplants is a favorite in our home.
http://casa-giardino.blogspot.com/2010/08/stuffed-eggplants-alla-casalese.html

[Ozark Homesteader]

10:42 PM on 10/20/2010

I like roasted eggplant on pizza, in baba ganouj, in eggplant parm, in ratatouille, in caponata, in curry . . . and we've had it most of these ways in the past few weeks.

What I'm finding I don't like so much is the variety of mottled purple eggplant pictured in the slide show. Unless I've missed the mark, that's a variety called fairy tale. I've found the skin disappointingly hard, not at all like you usually get with the Japanese varieties and other thinner eggplants. Fairy tale is pretty and probably sells well in farmers markets, but its taste and texture is, in my humble opinion, disappointing.
http://ozarkhomesteader.wordpress.com/

[LisaDi]

08:15 PM on 10/20/2010

Eggplant Parmigiana.....aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhheaven.

[IsabelRingin]

04:24 PM on 10/20/2010

Love eggplant. I like it best on a grilled sandwich.

[raosn]

03:52 PM on 10/20/2010

What is difference between eggplant and brinjal?

[OdinsEye]

09:58 PM on 10/20/2010

They are the same thing.

[Ljilja]

01:03 PM on 10/20/2010

Eggplant is one of my favorite vegetables!

Here's a recipe I like: roast some eggplant and peppers. Peal. Mix with salt, pepper, fresh chopped garlic, olive oil, and red wine vinegar.

Delicious!

http://graciouslivingdaybyday.com/

[mellene]

11:20 AM on 10/20/2010

The lasagna with prociutto sounds interesting. My all time favorite has to be ratatouille.

[no exit]

10:53 AM on 10/20/2010

Some of these recipes sound really good, but is there a simple recipe that's good for beginners? I've only had eggplant once many years ago and didn't like the texture, but maybe that was just that particular eggplant. It was a little soft with not much flavor.

[Ophie511]

04:20 PM on 10/20/2010

Something really easy to try is making a homemade pizza with it.... Cube the eggplant and sautee it in olive oil briefly with sliced zucchini, yellow squash, garlic and onions. You can add some oregano and parm, if you like. Then use that for the toppings on a homemade pizza. It is delicious, healthy, and it introduces you to the flavor of eggplant in a really familiar and friendly way. :-)

Also, keep in mind that the eggplant is a very moist veggie. If you want to avoid that 'mushy' texture of it, you can cut it, salt it and let it sit for a while. The salt will extract some of the moisture. Then you can pat it dry with a paper towel and resume cooking. I love eggplant!

[no exit]

05:35 PM on 10/20/2010

That sounds delicious, have written it down, and I will try it - thank you for the recipe!

[Chaling]

10:27 AM on 10/20/2010

just finished a large breakfast and the mere pic made me famish for Purnima Garg's Eggplant and Tomato Curry.

my sister regularly makes delicious eggplant lasagna.

[rsaillant1]

07:58 AM on 10/20/2010

When replenishing the liquid, try mixing in some
good red wine, in lieu of tap water.

[joelaf]

06:46 AM on 10/20/2010

Mock fried oysters. I use a melon baller. Soak them in fish sauce overnight. Dredge them in cornmeal and pan fry.

[Pennsanic]

04:14 PM on 10/21/2010

I'm going to try that!

[ghee99]

06:15 AM on 10/20/2010

i can think of one idea for those eggplants that wasn't mentioned in the article

[michla]

03:36 AM on 10/20/2010

Don't know why we call it eggplant. Brits call it aubergine which is the French name too.

[Katco]

12:44 PM on 10/20/2010

The name of eggplant was given it by Europeans in the middle of the eighteenth century because the variety they knew had fruits that were the shape and size of goose eggs. That variety also had fruits that are a whitish or yellowish colour rather than the wine purple that is more familiar to us nowadays. So the sort they knew really did look as though it had fruits like eggs.

In Britain, it is usually called an aubergine, a name which was borrowed through French and Catalan from its Arabic name al-badinjan. That word had reached Arabic through Persian from the Sanskrit vatimgana, which indicates how long it has been cultivated in India. In India, it has in the past been called brinjal, a word which comes from the same Arabic source as British aubergine, but filtered through Portuguese (the current term among English speakers in India is either the Hindi baingan, or aubergine).

[Amanda Donovan]

11:16 AM on 10/21/2010

wow.

[ru3]

05:44 PM on 10/23/2010

in spanish we call it berengena, which sounds similar to brinjal. Interesting info, thanks!