Every Wed. is vegetable day, which generally means super cooking extravaganza. Generally I make stuff with the veggies I already know are tasty. Then I research a whole bunch of recipes for the other veggies that I am either ignorant of or scared of. Generally there’s a 3:1:1 ratio of stuff I like: stuff I know nothing about: stuff I have had before and not liked but am willing to try. Generally at least one of the food experiments turns ugly and I either suffer through it, mess it up, or end up throwing it out. Now, being raised by the Depression-era son of grocers I am paranoid about throwing out food, but sometimes, it has to be done. Like in the bok choy experiment. I couldn’t choke that stuff down.

Today though, I have triumphed over my farm share with an awesome cooking lineup. Usually I would have to at least buy some stuff to make the ingredients work.  But not today!  I got tomatoes and blueberries, which I will eat by themselves, and an onion, which I will eat in other stuff. I also got a cucumber, which I use in cucumber water to beat the heat. However, I got yellow squash and eggplant. While I like yellow squash, I had only broiled it. Though today I made a cream squash soup. Yumtastic.

Eggplant is touchy for me. Either I love it or it seriously makes me want to heave. I was a little frightened. I have always wanted to make baba ganoush. Once my Romanian roommate made it years ago and it took HOURS. It involved slaving, grilling, baking, blender. So much work! But I thought it was worth the try. And it turned out great. What I learned:

• Don’t be that picky about not including skin or seeds. It’s fine.
• You can get a pretty good smoky flavor by roasting/burning some of the eggplant with skin on (2 eggplants).
• The rest can totally be microwaved (3 more eggplants). While mushy watery eggplant is usually gross it’s a positive in the baba ganoush situation.
• Do not use tiny eggplants. It will be a pain in your ass.
• Use rounder types with white flesh–not the stringy kind.  I used some roundish purple and white striped ones.  I don’t know what kind they are, but this is the closest photo I could find:

In other food news, I found this table which shows you what your body actually wants when it craves things.  Mainly my body craves cheese.  But apparently that’s the good thing you eat when your body craves bad things.  My body has skipped the middleman.  I don’t know how much I buy this chart, but it’s interesting.