Eggplant

Grilled or fried plain without blanching is a good way to go, olive oil, a little sea salt and pepper, YUM.

If you look on the internet there are a lot of eastern recipes that use eggplant in a variety of ways...

Ahh, now I want me some Baba ghanoush

hopeless151 wrote:How is an easy way to cook just a bit to try for just myself? I am feeling just a little brave! :-)

My recipe .......Aubergene /egg plant as a starter or snack

Put a bit of butter in a thick bottomed fry pan , gently melt it . Don't get it burnt and turned gritty brown .



Make up a mix of 2/3 plain flower and 1/3 corn flower added generous twisting of black peppercorn out the mill & a tiny pinch of salt.

Hand whisk or use your electric wizzer to beat up two eggs till there is at least some decent froth on the mix .
Now slice up your egg plant into 1/3 inch thick slices cut from to to bottom to giver you an ovoid shape .
Dip the slice in the egg , cover both sides then dip it in the flower for a few seconds each side to pick up a decent coating .

Now gently fry in the buttered pan on a low heat , turning the slice to get it golden brown on each side .. serve hot and enjoy .

PS. I've always had a hankering to sprinkle some sweetened cinamon powder / cinamon sugar on the end product to see what it tasted like but not got round to it yet.. Might even be realy naughty and drizzle some maple or honey over it and see if it becomes a spicy dessert.

hopeless151 wrote:So I did as the Ball Blue Book said and blanched my eggplant for 4 minutes and it turned this awful greenish, greyish, brown color. Is this normal or are they bad???

they have not gone bad but it sounds to me like you blanched them too long, or didn't cool them down quickly enough. this is a batch of blanched and frozen eggplant that i just pulled out of the freezer today to make ratatouille, it hasn't even thawed yet but you can see that the color is very good:

Rowena -- I know you do all kinds of preserving (pressure canning, hot water bath, freezing, dehydration). Is that all you did for the eggplant -- just cube, blanch, and freeze? I have four plants, all with babies. One is about 3 or four inches long. Is that method your preferred method? I have to look up a good ratatouille recipe. I've never had it, but I like almost anything except liver, coffee, and chocolate cake. (But I do love brownies). I hope to do some canning this year, but most things will be done in small containers (like jelly jars for my spaghetti sauce). I will probably do a few pints as gifts. I have had eggplant parmigiano, and someone told me to slice, bread and fry the eggplant and then freeze the cooked slices.

my preference is to spread out my food storage in as many ways as possible, so i use all tested methods of food preservation that provide a good final product. with eggplant, my favorite is frozen, then dehydrated, then canned. they don't store well in a root cellar so i skip that.

for things that will be battered and fried, i freeze plain. then when it is time to cook, i batter the food while still frozen. the batter sticks just fine, and the finished dish is as tasty as if prepared fresh.

oh, i see i didn't answer your first question. for the eggplant in the picture, i cubed, blanched and shocked, then put them on a tray to flash freeze. once they were frozen, i put them in the bag. this was the very last of the 2011 eggplant. i'll start preserving them again in a few weeks, when the next several harvests come thru.

and to clarify: whatever food i'm dealing with, i try to have some of it frozen, some dehydrated, some canned, and some cellared if that is appropriate. this way, if one system fails, i won't lose the entire food storage.

What do you mean by "shocked"? :scratch:

memart1 wrote:What do you mean by "shocked"? :scratch:

How to Blanch and Shock vegetables<~~click
The purpose of blanching is to destroy certain enzymes in the vegetables and the shocking is to stop the cooking process quickly. the example given in the article is green beans. I personally blanch them for only two minutes from the time they go into the water.

i think the article is misleading. blanching for food preservation should not result in fully cooked food. it's purpose is to stop enzymatic action that causes the appearance to deteriorate while in storage. it helps in other ways (such as breaking cell walls so the food packs tighter in jars) but the primary reason for blanching is cosmetic.

when i blanch food i shock it for the same length of time that it was blanched or longer. and i make sure to have the water very cold, so that it is a true shock and not just a slow cool.

you can blanch in boiling water, in steam, or even in the microwave.

I take your reply to mean I should bring a large pot of water to a boil. Wash and cube the eggplant then drop it into the boiling water. After two minutes I should remove it from the boiling water and put it immediately into ice water for a minute or two. Dry on a clean kitchen towel and place on a baking sheet to freeze. When frozen, put in ziplock bags in recipe size amounts and return to the freezer. Is that the way it is done?

that's it! except that i don't bother freezing in recipe amounts, i just put it all together in a big container and make withdrawals on deposits as needed. flash freezing them first means they won't stick together.

Sounds great -- Thanks -- I knew you would know how to do it. This 70-yr-old needs her mommy for things like that!

How do you flash freeze?

drain the food so it isn't dripping wet, then place it in a single layer on a cookie sheet and put it in the freezer. when the outside is coated in hard frost you can put it in a storage container. for most things i use freezer bags or vacuum seal bags, because then i can squeeze them into nooks and crannies. my freezer is always about 90% full, so i have to wedge things in during the fall when i'm putting up the most food.

Turan wrote:

rowena___. wrote:
the first harvest is always for the table. the second harvest gets frozen. the third harvest gets dehydrated. the fourth gets canned.

That is an excellent tip for organizing processing. :lightbulb goes on:

I agree!

This is a great thread and I will be saving it! Not just for eggplant storage but for all the ideas! Thanks Rowena for all your knowledge! I did buy some strawberries in the Spring, rinsed them and flash froze them and they are now in a ziplock in my freezer. I was so excited I got it done and I can pull out just the amount I want. I love the idea of putting food up in all the different ways. It feels like a connection to my ancestors who were farmers! I also feel my love of gardening is genetic, lol!

Hmmmm, now I want an eggplant...

cheyannarach wrote: Hmmmm, now I want an eggplant...

Ayup! it's a marvelous thing!

I like eggplant and so I started one from seed this spring.  [First year gardening and SFG-ing]  I would grow eggplants just for their beautiful flowers.


Rowena provided some good information in this Topic thread.

Oooh! How preeeety!!!

What variety is that?

Thank you. Black Beauty, seed was from Ferry - Morse at Home Depot.

I really like eggplant parmesan. I broil the slices to gently brown them and make them a little firmer and slightly less juicy so they won't be too mushy in the final dish. It's just a matter of starting with a tomato sauce on the bottom of a 9 x 12 casserole pan and then layering the varying sized slices of eggplant to fit, sprinkling cheese and smearing some tomato sauce between layers and then adding some more on top. Give a heavy dusting on top with some breadcrumbs for some crunch and bake it till the eggplant has softened but isn't gooey, the cheese has melted, and breadcrumbs have browned into little bits of crust. Lots of the breadcrumbs will get soaked up by the tomato sauce, so the crust won't be uniform. It doesn't hurt to go heavy on the breadcrumbs just in case.

That flash-freezing idea is neat. I've never tried that, or even heard of it, before.

Re freezing/fridging fried slices of eggplant, with or without breading, I find they lose most of their texture and go limp. If breaded, the moistness permeates the breading, too, causing the slices to stick together. So I wind plastic wrap between the slices. (That's also a good way to turn large portions into items that can be easily separated in a freezer.) If you hope to get any of the crispness of breaded ones back, put them in the toaster oven. But really, something that moist that is breaded and fried usually gets a gummy crust when fridged.

After my lettuce and cool weather crops finished a while back, I went shopping for something to fill my squares with a 2nd crop.  One of the items I picked up was an eggplant transfer.  Now I don't know the 1st thing about raising an eggplant let alone how to make a meal of one, it just looked like something to grow that I never have and I wanted to try one.

Well..... fast forward to the present and here I am with 3 of them on my plant.  When/how do I know it is time to harvest?  What is something good to make with this beautiful veggie?  I see that eggplant parm is quite popular, but it appears that I have 3 of these that will be ready at different times so I am hoping for some suggestions on other ways to fix these so I get a well rounded experience.

Here are a couple of pictures I just took of 2 of them, the other is on the back side if the plant and difficult to get a shot of.

One of my favorites is to slice them up about 1/4 to 1/2" thick. Brush with olive oil and season with a little S&P, then toss on the grill. If you slice em up nice and thick, they make a great burger substitute IMO.  

bnoles I am joining your thread with a previous thread about the same thing. Read through this thread for more answers.