A Bountiful Harvest

Last week Dylan spent an entire morning pruning the two tomato plants in the main garden. They were huge; an avalanche of leaves exploding out of the cages, but hardly any tomatoes. At least, before Dylan pruned the plants, that's what we thought. For as big as they were, we had only gotten maybe one ripe tomato out of the two plants and only saw a few more green ones. With a pair of garden shears, Dylan uncovered a wealth of green tomatoes that had been hiding beneath the leaves, just desperate for some vitamin D therapy. Within a few short days, I pulled out a handful of luscious red fruit, with plenty more left on the vine. I couldn’t resist popping one in my mouth, I’ve never had much will power when it comes to these things. I used to eat a pint of grape tomatoes each week as a snack or mixed in with my kale and eggs for breakfast back in Seattle. I love tomatoes. Just as I had hoped, these crimson beauties came about as close as anything to the Mountain Magic tomatoes Dylan and I gorged ourselves on every weekend they were in season at the Ballard Sunday Market. We just couldn’t help ourselves and for 6-8 weeks we spent the majority of our market cash on tomatoes. 

In addition to fresh sweet tomatoes, we also have suddenly found ourselves with an abundance of eggplant. We have the long, skinny Japanese eggplants as well as the dark, fat Black Beauties. I have been monitoring the eggplants' growth with little K, checking in on them every morning to see how much they’ve grown. Since she’s had family in town and I’ve been doing projects all week, it had been a few days since I last looked in on them. When I went out to see about the tomatoes, I peeked over at the eggplant bed and found armfuls of eggplants, many of them ripe and begging to be harvested. The plants themselves are so heavy under the weight of their plump purple fruit that many of the eggplants sagged all the way to the ground, vulnerable and in need of rescue. I snipped off the ripe ones to distribute between the farm families and propped up the plants so the bugs wouldn’t get into the littler ones that still needed a few more days on the vine.

Naturally, I am insisting that we make good use of these wonderful new ingredients and make eggplant parm, one of my favorite dishes. We have everything we need to make it, even the cheese thanks to Margaret, Dylan’s mom, who sent us some recently. Eggplant parm is one of my most favorite foods and has been ever since Dylan made it for back when we first moved in together in 2008. Before that eye-opening culinary experience I thought eggplants that had been fried, soaked in tomato sauce and covered in parmesan cheese were designed to be served atop a bed of spaghetti, as they did at the Olive Garden. Back when I was a vegetarian, that was about the only dish I ever ate there and I was a frequent customer before I met Dylan and was introduced to a new level of quality eating. I could not have been more wrong about eggplant parm. By skipping the pasta and pressing the sliced eggplants for hours before frying them, they stood on their own as a casserole dish loaded with flavor and just the right amount of crispness to keep them from being mushy. I will never eat eggplant parm another way now. Who needs the pasta when the eggplants steal the show?

Luckily eggplants and tomatoes are quite the complementary pair, so we are in no shortage of ideas for what to do with our garden bounty this week. Dylan plans to make what is sure to be a delectable batch of vegetable antipasti, plenty of tomato sauce, an excess of baba ganoush, and as per my request, some eggplant fritters, my latest farm food obsession. I blame Dylan for getting me hooked on fritters, he should have known I would fall for them. It all started this week with our potluck theme of soups, stews, and comfort foods. Chicken soup and potatoes au gratin had already been claimed and so we settled on skillet pizzas having been inspired with last week’s successful sandwich wraps. We figured why not try out a skillet pizza? So Dylan prepped the dough and eventually spun out seven 8-inch, thin crust skillet pizzas. We got all our toppings from the garden and I seized the opportunity to make my favorite, eggplant parm pizza with the long slender Japanese eggplant I had picked earlier in the week that needed to be used. Reluctantly, Dylan agreed. He knew it would make for a delicious and interesting pizza after all and the skinnier eggplants are far less annoying to prepare and fry.

I haven’t had a whole lot of this skinny bright purple eggplant, it’s not the right size for eggplant parm, but I’d had it in some of the veggie dishes at our favorite restaurants in Seattle’s International District, where our first apartment in the city was. There was this one place, Shanghai Garden right across from the Asian grocery store, Uwajimaya, where we always used to get takeout from. One of our favorite dishes was garlic roasted Japanese eggplant, a Szechuan style dish that makes my mouth water just thinking about it. Before arriving in Hawaii, this is the only time I can remember eating this style of eggplant but it has quickly made it onto my list of favorites now. I guess that’s a good thing considering how many of them we are going to be eating over the next few weeks.

Back to our pizza-making endeavor, these long purple plants were the perfect size for our skillet pizzas, coming off the frying pan soft yet crispy and about the size of pepperoni slices. I would happily never buy a bag of potato chips or eat a french fry again if I could have these little treats whenever I wanted them. They were so good one their own I could barely restrain myself from eating them all before Dylan had the chance to get them onto the pizzas. I think I am going to have to learn to make these little fritters myself because there is no way I am going to convince Dylan to make them as often as I want to eat them. Despite how good he is at making eggplant parm, it’s one of his least favorite dishes to prepare. Something about being too time-consuming and a pain in the ass...whatever, I stop listening at no and get lost wallowing in my own misery because I know I won’t be eating any anytime soon. It’s high time I learn how to do this one myself. They are by no means difficult to make, I’ve watched Dylan fry eggplants plenty of times, it’s just easier (and faster) to let Dylan do it. In fact, I think I am going to make a batch of them tonight. I’ll let you know how they turn out.

PS. Isn't this watermelon radish the most beautiful vegetable you have ever seen? I'm in love, yet again...