Listen & Be Heard

Even More Ways to Preserve Eggplant

by

martha cinader
I’m always seeing hearts in my vegetables…

A month ago I was writing about what to do with eggplant because I had so many in my kitchen. In that post I talked about making fried eggplant and eggplant parmesan. When eggplant love is new it tastes so sweet and delicious. After a couple months of eating and freezing the stuff, I start to think about other vegetables again. My husband stopped watering his garden about a month ago, after he harvested everything else. He left his eggplants to their own devices while it was very hot and dry. We had almost no rain that whole time. But to our surprise, the eggplants have thrived while gardens have withered all over the Upstate.

We have trouble giving eggplant away. Our friends and neighbors mostly don’t like or never tried an eggplant and don’t show any signs of changing their minds. I was tempted to just let those eggplants go to seed, but they looked so big and beautiful; it would have been a shame and a waste. So yesterday I went down in the field and picked most of them, and also dealt with them very quickly after looking for some new ideas online and finding a couple at FreshBitesDaily.com.

The day’s harvest waiting at the kitchen door.

I decided to do two things with the eggplants: prepare some to be pureed, and some to be frozen in cubes. I pulled out all of my cookie sheets and turned on both my ovens. In the directions on Fresh Bites Daily it says to roast the eggplants whole for the puree. I decided to cut them in half, like I do squash, and bake them that way. That turned out fine. They were very easy to peel afterwards. I jammed them all into two glass containers that I put in the fridge to make puree and freeze later. The cubes took just a little longer to prepare because I cut the skin off the eggplants first and then cubed them. The whole process of preparing them for both methods probably took me about twenty minutes. After baking and cooling I put the same cookie sheets with the cubed eggplant in my deep freezer, to be packaged after they are frozen.

It was so easy to cut these eggplants in half and stick them in the oven.

Now I feel good that I saved all those eggplants and it really didn’t take me that long. I’ve always liked baba ghanoush so I plan to use the frozen puree to make some when I start longing for eggplant again. If you know a good recipe please do share. The cubes will be nice for stews and stir fries.

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