Friday, July 3, 2009

Dinner from the Garden

My husband started a vegetable garden this year. We have lived in Texas for 25 years and have tried to grow veggies a few times with little success but this time he was serious and we now have an amazing garden and the bounty just keeps coming. Our hot season is here and I am sure our harvest will go down for awhile but it will come back in the fall.

He planted several eggplants and they are now producing. I am not an eggplant lover at all so this week when he brought in five of the purple things I knew I was in trouble. I decided to make Eggplant Parmesan. I found a recipe on the internet at and since we also had lots of ripe tomatoes I made my own sauce. All of the produce that went into the sauce was from the garden. It called for quite a few herbs but I just went shopping outside with a pair of scissors.

The only thing I changed was that I had one lonely yellow squash so I put that in the sauce and I added some sugar to the sauce to give it a slightly sweet taste. I also cooked it longer so that it was thick and not runny.

When we sat down to eat it was amazing. This tasted so good that I wanted to cry. We each had a portion and then even though we wanted to eat more we could not because we were too full. I had leftovers for lunch yesterday and it was just as good the second time!
My daughter Sarah has made me promise to make this dish again when she can be with us because she has developed a passion for eggplant parmesan - apparently marriage can really change taste buds because I am sure that a few years ago she would not have even considered trying it.
There are some more eggplants out there and plenty of tomatoes so I will be making it again but the thing about growing your own is that you don't have control over when things are ready and you have to eat it when it is available.

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