Never Can Say Goodbye

I don’t care that it’s 50 degrees out and windy and rainy and my body is begging my wallet to buy a winter squash for a warming soup.

No.

I refuse.

If there are still tomatoes and eggplants and zucchinis at the farmers market, then I’m holding out for summer’s brightly colored bounty to keep me happy in the kitchen. And because of this ridiculous self-induced rule, I also over-buy, which is easy when 6 long and slender eggplants only cost $2.

What to do with that many eggplants?

I flirted with the idea of baba ganoush. But I just don’t love. To me, baba g plays the role of the just-slightly uglier step-sister. I really want baba g to succeed, it’s born from the same gene pool as its beautiful sister, hummus: garlic, tahini, lemon juice, oil, salt and pepper. Baba g isn’t as creamy, as smooth, as clean. The chickpea triumphs over the eggplant in this contest of dips.

Therefore, I ditched the baba g.

Eggplant, Feta and Sage Dip-Sauce

I charred and roasted the eggplants as David Lebovitz told me to, but I changed up the ingredients. Once the eggplants were out of the oven, I used a grapefruit spoon to split them open and scoop out the flesh. In a food processor I whizzed around: eggplant innards, feta, fresh sage leaves, 3 garlic cloves, lemon juice (1/2 lemon), salt and pepper.

I had absolutely no idea what I’d really do with all of this “dip,” as I called it that day. Oh, and did I mention that I just made this in the middle of the day on Saturday just because (well, to be honest, I was procrastinating from finishing the interview.)

I piled the eggplant mixture into tupperware and left it in the fridge for a few days.

Then there was the issue of dinner. It was 50 degrees out and windy and rainy and I was cursing myself for not buying that squash to make a thick orange-hued soup. But I remembered my eggplant.

Boiled water, threw in fettuccine. Warmed up the eggplant dip with finely chopped mizuna and added two ladel-fuls of the pasta cooking water to make it more saucy. Tossed it together and topped it with more feta and freshly ground black pepper.  (PS – I used the tag “healthy” because there was no oil in the eggplant sauce.)