Vegetables the next day

July 26: I don't mean to imply that recipes are uninteresting. On the contrary! Kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot has excellent vegetable recipes, short times, simple ingredients. Check out the beets sliced with butter and paprika.

Let me also refer you to the recent Wall Street Journal personal section on the health benefits of vegetables.

But what I wonder is, do you ever have vegetables mouldering in the bottom drawer of your refrigerator? If so, why? There are two beets in my fridge that are growing a soft cloud of mildew. They may or may not still be edible. How did they get lost, or is the word, abandoned?

And what about the eggplant that sometimes has to be thrown away, riddled as it is with elliptical soft spots? I have made myself a rule: no buying more of some vegetable until you've used what's already there. Perhaps I just hate eggplant, but feel that I ought to like it.

Here is Elizabeth David on eggplant, from French Country Cooking 1951, p. 159:
Aubergines en Gigot (the index has no mention of eggplant, so I looked up the French word)

"A recipe from the Catalan coast of France, and perhaps the best way of eating aubergines.

In each whole, unpeeled, aubergine, make two rows of small incisions; into these put alternatively small pieces of bacon and closes of garlic which have been rolled in salt, pepper and herbs, either marjoram or basil.

Put the aubergines in a roasting dish with a little oil poured over them, cover the dish and roast them in a slow oven for about 1 hour.

To be served as a separate course. They are also very good cold, split open, salted, and with a little fresh oil poured over."