Bridging one season to the next, my garden is now a study in extremes.
One end lush with young salad greens, beets and carrots while the other is a veritable respite home for tomatoes stooped under the weight of leprous fruit.
Call me wasteful, but I haven’t managed to muster the enthusiasm for green-tomato relish or chutney when the sheer number of green tomatoes weighing down the vines is mind-boggling and so disappointing all at once. Why couldn’t they have ripened soon enough for canning? Yet I still have several dozen pale specimens ripening quite nicely on the kitchen window sill.
More manageable are the undersized eggplants and peppers still clinging to life. Those lonely stragglers fairly beg to be brought inside out of the cold. So with odd bits of produce populating my kitchen counter this weekend, I resolved to turn them into something delicious that would also keep well beyond a single meal.
Sure, quick stir-frys can be catch-alls for small quantities of vegetables and meat, but leftover stir-fry, particularly using ingredients that have passed their peak of freshness, is never appealing. A dish meant for a softer texture is kinder to older, slightly shriveled vegetables.
That’s where relishes, chutneys and sauces come in. Food columnist Jan Roberts-Dominguez covered this topic and presented several recipes in the Oct. 7 A la Carte.
However, I needed one specifically combining eggplant and tomatoes. The popular Italian bruschetta condiment, caponata, was the perfect dish. I’ve already posted a recipe for pepperonata (basically what it sounds like) to this blog. Substitute eggplant for the peppers, and you get the idea. The dish relies on vinegar and capers for its distinctive taste.
And although I have a recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks, “Jamie’s Italy,” by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, caponata is forgiving. It doesn’t require exact quantities, just a feel for proportions.
I started by sauteing about a quarter of a red onion, diced, in a tablespoon or so of olive oil with about three finger-length Japanese eggplants. Let those get soft and mooshy and then add a couple cloves of chopped garlic and the finely minced stems from a few sprigs of Italian parsley.
Let it cook a little more and throw in about six chopped green olives and a dozen capers. Season with salt and red-pepper flakes. Deglaze the pan with a few tablespoons of red-wine vinegar or a mixture of balsamic vinegar and wine.
Let the alcohol cook off while you chop up the tomatoes, add those to the pan, cook a little more and finish the whole thing with the minced parsley leaves and a drizzling of good-quality olive oil. In the time it took to bake a loaf of brown-and-serve bread, I had about one and a half cups of a delicious spread, enough for lunch and another meal.
That’s leftovers I can love.
