Eggplant and Opportunities

This story starts with eggplant, or berenjena in Spanish. It's a simple vegetable, popular in many regions or the world, but relatively unknown in Latin America. The organization I work for, Children First, runs the Emma Family Resource Center in West Asheville. The Resource Center gets fresh produce donated from MANNA FoodBank and eggplant is a regular item in the food pantry. But what to do with all the eggplant?

Every Friday afternoon we have a Latino playgroup at the Resource Center. Moms and kids have been coming for years to play, share food, have classes, and build community. And lately they started asking Maria, the coordinator, about how to lose weight, what are healthy cooking oils, and how to cook eggplant.

So Maria and I organized a cooking demonstration with Chef Laurey Masterton from Laurey’s Catering & Gourmet to Go (I’ve written about her before, she’s a generous friend to our agencies). We told Laurey the questions the women had about cooking. In addition to how to cook eggplant, they wanted to know what to do with the greens that are so popular in this area. They also asked how to prepare pasta without the heavy cream sauce that they were used to.

On a rainy Friday afternoon, Laurey showed up at the Resource Center with fresh eggplant, ripe tomatoes, and bundles of crisp greens like rainbow chard, kale, and collards. Women with children slowly trickled in and the local TV station even showed up. We eventually had three moms and a handful of kids. It turned out to be a small, but eager, group.

Maria translated everything in to Spanish while Laurey cooked, talked, and told stories. Laurey started by showing how to cook the greens. She explained that in Western North Carolina, as in much of the south, it is typical to cook greens for hours and hours with pieces of pork meat or fat. However, she prefers them prepared lightly and quickly. She sautéed Swiss chard with olive oil, garlic and topped it with lemon juice. The colors stayed bright and the greens were crisp. The women hesitantly took bites and said they liked it. She cooked kale with a little bit of bacon and braised it until just tender. One woman waited the whole class to try the kale.

For the “berenjena” lesson, it started with roasting a whole eggplant. After cutting it in half and rubbing it with olive oil, it went in to a hot oven for a half hour or so. While the eggplant cooked, Laurey showed the women how to make a fresh pasta sauce out of whole tomatoes. Simple ingredients like chopped tomatoes, onion, pepper, and basil were cooked quickly for the sauce. She served it over rotini pasta. Not only did the moms go back for seconds, they called their kids over to try it and an older sibling fed her baby sister the pasta too. This is what I mean about rebuilding the family ties to food. It can start this simply.

Once the eggplant was soft, Laurey scooped out the flesh and mashed it up with chopped onion, red bell pepper, basil, salt and some vinegar. It was her version of an Italian capponata. The women were surprised. They loved it. They went back again and again to dip crackers in to the eggplant appetizer. Children tried it and my own toddler, Lucy, even asked for more.

It’s tempting to try to recreate the recipes here. To try to describe how Laurey cooked and how things tasted. But it was really about the women being curious. Wanting to know how to cook a bit healthier. How to cook greens or eggplant or a lighter pasta sauce. In the familiar setting of the Resource Center, they watched a chef cook, tasted new food, and asked questions. I don’t want to make too much out of it, but it could be the start of something new. Their children were there, hearing, and tasting the same new foods and enjoying the flavors.

But what really got me was that the learning wasn’t only for the women. The camera man from the local TV station was right there with us. He tried the greens and couldn’t believe how good they were although they were cooked minutes, instead of hours. On his way out the door, he said he was going to go buy greens and cook them for his wife that night. She said she’d never believe they didn’t have to be cooked all day long. It reminds me to stay open – open to the possibilities and open to opportunities to learn.