Revisionist History Eggplant
living, laughing, learning, and moving on
New here? Hi! If you want to get right down to business, scroll down for the new video release and allllll the way to the bottom for the recipe (in PDF and plain text!).
And happy last day of July to YOU!
This week’s recipe has a personal story, which I tell in the first few minutes of the video, while peeling eggplant. (I’m also having a GREAT hair day in the video, which is also worth watching for, thankyouverymuch.)
Tl;dr: I first made this dish, winging it with friends, at a super fun dinner party a couple of years back. Today, I can’t call those same people my friends, and in the in between part, I mourned that friendship hard.
Every time I thought about that party, I got sad. I think one of the hardest things about going through a friend breakup is looking back and wondering whether the connections were ever real in the first place. To be clear, I was the one who got dumped, so for me there was a lot of—did they ever even like me in the first place???
This eggplant, which was my favorite thing on the table that night, got dragged into the rejection undertow, like a cute sweater you wore to work the day you got fired—never going to eat/wear that thing again! Bad vibes galore!
Over time, with the help of so many phone calls to the friends who are still my friends1, who listened to me (endlessly) work through my feelings about this thing, I got past the hurt feelings. In therapy, I learned that I have a real soft spot for narcissists, and am working on how to spot them in the future. (Literally, “no more narcissists” is on my goal list for 2025.)
I also realized that the eggplant was an innocent bystander in this whole drama. Why, after everything else, should I also lose out on a great eggplant dish!??! That eggplant didn’t do anything to me! So I set out to reclaim the nightshade and transform a bad dish association into a recipe that brings a little sweetness into this whole bittersweet and cautionary tale.
When I remade the dish, from memory, I had to fill in some blank spots. How did we cut the onions that night? What herbs were on top, if any? Did I season the Labne on the platter, or was it scooped on plain? As my mom loves to say: WHO CAN SAY???
The memory is whatever I want to make it. I added sugar to the onions and drizzled honey over the finished dish, because I really do believe that life is sweet. Technically, though, from a flavor standpoint, it balanced the tangy yogurt, vinegary onions, and charred flavors on the eggplant. Sour, sweet, salt, bitter—they’re a team, not competitors.
Food is crazy, huh? It brings us together and marks special occasions, and it can also be there with as a supportive and creative process in the present, as you go through whatever you’re going through. I got lucky with this one. The finished dish is more delicious than I remember, and I’m no longer haunted by losing a great recipe on top of everything else. I didn’t reject the original eggplant’s origin story. I worked it into the dish it is now, a dish that’s mine, and a celebration of summer that I’ll feed to whoever sits at my table this August and next August and hopefully lots of Leo seasons after that. Even if no one else is there: eggplant is a forever friend of mine. (The leftovers, eaten straight from the fridge, are INSANE.)
To you, my luscious and creamy friends: thank you for reading.