Eggplant, Death, and Taxes

I have a plethora of pretty eggplant pictures to share but my six year old broke my computer so I'm writing from our laptop which I haven't been able to upload pictures to.

Yesterday I did a lot. I worked from morning until night while letting Max ruin my computer playing some car racing game. I made ratatouille. I grilled eggplant rounds. I baked eggplant. I took pictures of the baked eggplant I gutted and stuffed with the most wonderful lemon thyme stuffing that I made up on the spur of the moment. Then I ate eggplant. I burned my tongue on eggplant. If I was a cartoon I would have eggplant reflections in my eyes instead of pupils.

I want more eggplant. But first I need to finally procure the freezer I've decided to buy. I found it at Lowe's for a good price. A 14.1 cubic foot upright manual defrost unit made by Fridgidaire. I plan to fill it with eggplant so that when I am longing for an eggplant sandwich in the middle of winter when the icy rain is coming down, I can defrost myself some sunshine. I want to also fill the freezer with tomatoes.

I find it fascinating that my favorite vegetables are all related to bella donna. Potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant all belong to the same family. All of them have either been believed to be poisonous at one time or another, or actually have poisonous components (as in: potato leaves). I hear about all these diet restrictions that people impose on themselves through a nutritionist's advice, or through blood-type diets and tomatoes are frequently cited as a problem food.

So could a person like myself be suffering because of eating too many tomatoes, but not realize the life of blooming health I could be experiencing, if only I would give up tomatoes? I wonder, because in my experience, when one is allergic to a food, even in a mild way, one can't help but notice that they don't feel good after eating said food. If tomatoes are bad for me, I think I wouldn't feel so damn good after eating them. They don't just taste good to me, they feel good in every way.

I don't eat bell peppers because they repeat on me. They've been repeating on me since I was a small child. I would watch my mother prepare stuffed green peppers with dread because I never felt good after eating them. I didn't get sick, I would just burp them up for twelve hours afterwards. It wasn't until I was an adult, cooking for myself, that I realized I didn't have to eat them anymore, and that if my body consistently burped them up no matter how they were prepared or whether they were red or green or yellow, I probably was mildly allergic to them or incapable of digesting them well. Both good reasons not to eat them. Since eradicating them from my diet, I have been much happier and felt much better.

You'd be amazed at how many dishes bell peppers end up in. You could macerate them and hide them and I will always know if they've been in the food I'm eating. It's like meat, you could make a dish that gave no hint of meat, cleverly disguising it, but I will know within an hour that I have eaten flesh or eaten something that's been cooked with flesh. Why? My stomach doesn't digest it. I burp up meat flavor. Seriously. Can you think of anything more revolting? I know, I can too. But still, burping flavors I don't like in the first place is one of those experiences in life that I can just do without.

You know what freaks me out? To eat black bean soup and an hour later suddenly burp up pig flavor. That happened to me once. Do you know how freaky it is to never eat meat, not even as a kid, and suddenly have meat burps? When that happened to me I dug the soup can out of the trash can at work where I had eaten it and read the ingredients. Sure enough, the beans had been cooked with ham hocks or some such piggy parts.

Potatoes are one of those foods I can eat endlessly. Every single day. Almost any way. Except with bell peppers or meat, obviously. I love potato lore, it's history, it's plenitude. I love it's earthiness. I love how well it goes with everything. I don't actually eat potatoes as often as I would like. Especially since vowing never to buy conventionally grown ones ever again.* So I have my twenty pounds of garden potatoes that I've been slowly working on from the pantry since early summer, and the supply is getting low.

Today I'm reluctantly setting aside my obsession with storing nuts in my cheeks for the winter and I'm going to work in my studio. Finish up a few projects. (To pay for the freezer, actually). But my mind is going to be drifting through recipe books, the farm fields where tomatoes and eggplants continue to ripen just for me. I'm sending them messages that I will come for them, like a mother-ship to her alien babies.**

My own garden is finished for the year. I just picked the last bowl of produce last night. If I had had my act together, I would have planted a winter garden and it would be gearing up. But I didn't. That's alright. There's always next year. Unless death or taxes get to me first.




*You won't either if you read Michael Pollan's book "The Botany Of Desire".
**What the??!!!!!!