This is the time of year when gardeners like to cruise the seed catalogs looking for something new, hoping to create a renewed palette of edibles for their garden in the coming months. For those of you that like to delve into the world of vegetables, there are a few fresh faces on the market representing a favorite of mine that’s as good fried on its own as it is stealing the spotlight from chicken parmesan.
Today I thought I would give you a glimpse into some of the new offerings on the market to whet your appetite for the upcoming gardening season. On the eggplant scene, Johnny’s Select Seeds is offering two new Indian types this year—‘Suraj’ and ‘Raja’.
Both ‘Suraj’ and ‘Raja’ are small eggplants that average 2 ½ – 3 inches long and 2 inches wide. ‘Raja’ is a white eggplant while ‘Suraj’ is a pretty, medium to light purple. The plants are compact and high-yielding. Due to the diminutive size of the eggplants, this new duo is recommended for stuffing.
Cooking Demo to Showcase these Pinky-sized Jewels in Caponata
Rebecca Lando is writer, producer, and host of the Web series Working Class Foodies. She will present cooking demonstration along with Chef Brendan McDermott at The Edible Garden Conservatory Kitchen on Saturday, August 28, at 1 and 3 p.m.
Eggplant is kind of the middle child of the summer farmer’s market.
Inedible raw unlike tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, and more complex to prepare than grilled or boiled corn, eggplant seems to stand out for all the wrong reasons: its dense flesh and generally heavy preparation can make it a bit of an overlooked anomaly. The time and degree of cooking generally necessary for eggplant makes it an awkward summer crop, seemingly out of place when you’re craving a light, refreshing dinner.
My mother used to halve and hollow large eggplants, stuff them with a sauteed mix of ground lamb, cubed eggplant flesh, onion, olives, and spices, top them with cheese, and broil them until the cheese was bubbly and the eggplant skin was crispy. Delicious and filling, but it would be torturous to eat in summer. Likewise, eggplant parmesan is too heavy for the hot months, and even a cooling baba ghanouj means turning on the oven.
But eggplant is far more versatile than you might think. Sliced thick and rubbed with a paste of olive oil, sea salt, crushed hot pepper, oregano, and lemon juice, then thrown on the grill, it’s a hearty and healthy alternative to steak. Cooked the same way and then cut down into cubes, it’s a fantastic base for a rustic Provencal ratatouille.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center.
When I grow vegetables, I count on a wide array of cooking magazines and celebrity chef’s to challenge and stretch my imagination so that I can find creative ways to prepare my bounty.
The other day I was flipping through a cooking magazine featuring Greek cuisine. I perused the magazine with interest, since one of our Celebrity Chef Kitchen Gardens for The Edible Garden was created by Chef Michael Psilakis, owner of Kefi and author of How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking. (He will present a cooking demonstration at the Conservatory Kitchen on October 16 as part of Fall Finale Weekend.)
Michael’s garden bed is filled with dandelion greens, grapevines, arugula, mint, dill, tomatoes, artichokes, and eggplants. His culinary style is a sophisticated Greek modern fusion that seamlessly combines fish or meat with vegetables, spices, and herbs.
The magazine’s stuffed eggplant recipe (from another Greek chef) caught my interest. Eggplants stuffed with lamb, tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, onion and garlic, seasoned with cinnamon, oregano, cloves and nutmeg. Yum. That’s delicious, culturally complex, comfort food if you ask me.
Eggplants are a favorite of mine in the vegetable garden. A staple of the warm season crops (those planted after the last frost date), eggplants love the heat, and I generally wait until June 1 to set my transplants into warm soil.
NYBG Student Travels to Asia to Trace Eggplant’s Roots
Rachel Meyer, a doctoral candidate at the Botanical Garden, specializes in the study of the eggplant’s domestication history and the diversity of culinary and health-beneficial qualities among heirloom eggplant varieties. She will hold informal conversations about her work atThe Edible Garden‘sCafé Scientifique on September 13.
The eggplant (Solanum spp.) may not seem like the world’s most exciting food crop at first thought, but its history and diversity are actually quite intriguing. The common name, “eggplant,” actually covers more than one species, whose size, shape, color, and flavor are remarkably different throughout the world.
People have grown eggplants for over 2,000 years in Asia, and it is thought that eggplants were used as medicine before being selected over time to become a food. Many present-day cultivars of eggplants still contain medicinally potent chemical compounds, including antioxidant, aromatic, and antihypertensive, some of which might be the same compounds responsible for flavor as well.
If we can unravel the history of the eggplant’s domestication and investigate the health-beneficial and gastronomic qualities of heirloom eggplant varieties, we can promote specific varieties that may be useful to small-scale farmers, practitioners of alternative medicine, and eggplant lovers around the world.
I spent seven weeks in China and the Philippines last winter exploring how different ethnic groups use local eggplant varieties. These regions in Asia are important, because scientists are still not sure where eggplants were first domesticated (that is, selected by people over generations for desirable qualities instead of just harvested from the wild). We know it was in tropical Asia, but the written record doesn’t go back far enough to provide more clues. For that reason I also collected wild relatives of eggplant that might be the ancestor of the domesticated crop.
The eggplant (Solanum spp.) may not seem like the world’s most exciting food crop at first thought, but its history and diversity are actually quite intriguing. The common name, “eggplant,” actually covers more than one species, whose size, shape, color, and flavor are remarkably different throughout the world.