I’ll confess right off. Eggplant and I have a rocky relationship.

It’s not because eggplant isn’t Robert-Redford handsome. Just look at that smooth skin and that sensuous coloring.

It’s also not because I don’t try. I do.  I just have trouble finding stellar recipes that showcase eggplant.

I do have a few recipes that I like a lot that incorporate eggplant and, in fact, I have posted some of them on Blue Cayenne (Blue Cayenne Eggplant Recipes ). It just seems like eggplant should be much more important in my cooking life. After all, eggplant is embraced as a key food in much of the world.

So, I’ve decided to give eggplant another chance in my kitchen and I’m on the lookout for great eggplant recipes. If you have one, please send it to me. Let’s start with this one. It is an adaptation of a Deborah Madison recipe from her beautiful cookbook, Vegetable Literacy. In her introduction to the recipe, she mentions that the dish was served as a main dish by the Seed Savers Exchange Heritage Farm. The farm is a 13,000-member organization that homes (and sells and exchanges) the seeds of 20,000 heirloom and open-pollinated plants in a quest to protect biodiversity in this age of genetically-engineered agriculture. If you are interested in their project, here is a link to their site: https://www.seedsavers.org. They sound like good folks to me.

Here is the recipe.

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You can buy a copy of Madison’s book on Amazon. Here is the link:Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy.

Trust me. It’s tough photographing frozen yogurt.

The stuff melts. There you are setting up the shot–just the right lighting…just the right angle– and bam! By the time you are ready to release the shutter, your subject has melted and those pretty little chunks of fresh nectarine are bobbing in the milky liquid at the bottom of the bowl. Aargh.

Juliet and I were forced to eat four melted bowls of it before I got the shot right.  I thought of it as sacrificing for my art.  Juliet thought of it as doggie heaven.

So…we’re experts on this particular recipe. Here’s our review. First,if you put nectarines and plain yogurt together, you get quite a bit of tang. This frozen yogurt has a lot of tang but it’s a tang in the best possible way. You can adjust the sweet side of the equation by adding more sugar.

This frozen yogurt has a lot of other great qualities, too. It is a beautiful hue of…well…nectarine. It is creamy. It pairs beautifully with sorbets or other flavors of frozen yogurt. I paired it with raspberry sorbet at an impromptu dinner party and it was a magical dessert. It’s easy to make, too.

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This recipe was adapted from one on the kneadbakecook.com site. Here is a link: kneadbakecook.com.

You’re pretty sure to be the only person to bring this salad to the next potluck.

It’s unusual.

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Hetty McKinnon’s imaginitive salad cookbook, Neighborhood. I find myself repeatedly going to her cookbooks when I want something out of the ordinary.  This particular recipe combines cumin-scented roasted cauliflower with fried lentils and serves the whole thing atop a bed of creamy spinach yogurt. With a good deal of fresh mint involved, the delicious end result leans toward Middle Eastern flavors.

Unusual? What was the last time you put the salad dressing on the bottom of the salad?

Here is my adaptation of McKinnon’s recipe. You can buy her cookbook Neighborhood on Amazon here.

I posted one of McKinnons other great recipes here. It is a recipe for Gorgonzola Baked Fennel With Cannellini Beans, Tomatoes, Olives and Pine Nuts.  You might want to give it another look. It, too, is delicious.

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