Eggplant Rescue and a Re-discovered Cookbook

We’re a little sick of eggplant around here. We joined a different CSA this year because the previous one (that I loved – every week a new culinary adventure of heirlooms and weird vegetables)  no longer drops at a convenient pickup location. This new farm, while perfectly fine with very generous shares,  has a rather blah selection and too much repetition. Green cabbage again and again, cucumbers, cucumbers and more cucumbers. (I think we’re done with them… no photos to show.) Yummy – but just same ol’ tomatoes and collard greens gigantic enough to cover a roof with. And eggplant. Week after week – at least one, and usually more, eggplants. And that’s even after splitting the share with my friend. (Do I sound like a brat, complaining about this bounty?)

Of course there is eggplant parm, baba ganoush, stir fried, thin slices salted and made into ‘chips’. I’ve made them all for what has become, an ambivalent audience. And in the next week’s load of vegetables – more eggplant!  This weekend I remembered a recipe I’d made years ago out of  Festa del Giardino: A Harvest of Recipes and Family Memories.  While this not the kind of cookbook I’m usually a sucker for — no beautiful photos — it has concise, easy to follow recipes that result in obviously memorable dishes. Like this Caponata I whipped up yesterday.

I remember Molly being younger than 10 and a kid who hated veggies, digging in. I’m afraid you might be hard-pressed to find this book now out-of-print, by local author and lovely Sally Maraventano who came to the store for a book signing in 1999.  (But she does have her own cooking school.)

I’m delighted to have found this obviously well-used cookbook again and inspired to rediscover the great recipes in it and the rest of this overflow stash that always escapes my periodic book-purges. Next, maybe I’ll bake bread…