Making eggplant a little less lonely

When faced with an abundance of dark purple eggplant, I’m always reminded of the late food writer Laurie Colwin, who listed countless concoctions and fun ways to prepare her favorite vegetable in an essay titled “Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant.”

But as I inspected last week’s community-supported agriculture box to find only a single, Japanese variety — long and narrow with a thin skin — it felt a little more as if the eggplant was alone in the kitchen with me.

What to do with one measly vegetable? How to stretch it into a full meal?

Pasta was my first thought, but rather than chop it up only to have it fade into a tangled nest of noodles, I opted to build upward.

I sliced the eggplant into thick rounds, and roasted it with plenty of olive oil, salt and pepper. Then I stacked fat slices of Roma tomato on top — just about the same diameter — and finished it all with shredded mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses. The tray went back into the oven to melt the cheese, and a minute or two under the broiler produced dark bubbles on top.

To beef up the dish a bit, I sauteed rounds of precooked, sliceable polenta in a pan, and used it as a base for the eggplant Parmesan bites. The dish is surprisingly filling, and fun to eat for both adults and kids.

More abundant in the CSA box was peak-season corn, so that went into a sauce for the second recipe. “Pesto,” to be exact, only made without the traditional green basil.

Whirl the corn — lightly sauteed with plenty of garlic — in a food processor with olive oil, lemon juice, Parmesan cheese and toasted walnuts. You can use the more-expected pine nuts if you’d rather, though we loved the nutty, slightly bitter notes that the walnuts brought to the dish.

If you’re serving this over pasta, you’ll want to dilute the pesto with some of the well-salted pasta water, and serve immediately before it thickens too much around the noodles. Garnish with basil for color, and finish with a bit of extra cheese.

The dish is certainly hearty enough for a full meal, but it would also go well as a side dish for the eggplant — yet another way to enhance the lonely vegetable until you have a little more.