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food & drink Made With the 'Shade By Mary Welp Illustration by Carrie Neumayer No way you're going to feel anything but love for the grilled eggplant in this zesty fall salad. 74 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 10.13 N ightshade haters won't want to hear it, but I am going to talk you through a recipe that will convert even the most die-hard eggplant-averse. Here is how I know. My son was an eggplant enemy from the time he was old enough to recognize one. Maybe it was because he'd read a book called Death by Eggplant. Maybe it was that he felt betrayed by the interior of the vegetable the frst time he tasted it. He wanted that dark, shiny exterior to reveal something inside besides baba ghanoush. Bottom line: He hated the stuf worse than George Bush Sr. hates broccoli. Te only exception he allowed was the use of eggplant in a still-life painting. But then one night last summer, a week or so before my son moved away to college, my super-gardener friend left a huge box of vegetables at my front door. After I got through cussing out the men in my house for not bringing the box inside, I started sorting through it, and toward the bottom I found seven or eight of the most gorgeous eggplants I had ever seen. Only one was the common "aubergine" color. Te others were various shades of purple (lavender, magenta, violet, plum-striped), and two were pure ivory. All were thin. Svelte, even. I placed them in their own painted ceramic bowl and carried them into the living room, where my son was watching Orange Is the New Black on his laptop computer instead of packing necessities for college. "You really ought to watch this, Mom," he said without looking up from the screen. "It's probably the most feminist show ever made." I said nothing, merely placing the eggplant bowl down on the table next to him. He did not look up. I walked back into the kitchen and texted him, "Eggplant is the new eggplant." Finally, I heard him pause his computer. "Holy ____!" he said. "What? Tese are eggplants?" He did not have an immediate Saulon-the-road-to-Damascus conversion experience. He fnished watching the episode of Orange and then another one after that. But once he did haul himself of the sofa, he was suddenly all nightshade-curious. He wanted to know if the specimens in the bowl were actually edible. He refused to believe they were until he went of to do some Wiki research, after which he returned to school me in the pharmaceutical properties of nightshade: Did I know it was related to belladonna? Did I know that for centuries people used it as a narcotic? Did I know the Romantic poets wrote about it? Yes, yes and yes, I said. And did he know Dire Straits sang a song about it? "Who are the Dire Straits?" He then went online and found the recipe that was the basis for the one below. Just as I did not roll my eyes when he was schooling me in the opiate properties of nightshade, I did not shout, "Ach! I can't stand Bobby Flay!" Instead, I looked over the recipe, and it sounded, well, not bad. Te long and short of it is, I think the boy wanted me to make a big ol' walloping batch of eggplant because he wanted to see if he could cop a buzz of the stuf. First we had to get past the hurdle of his wanting to hold on to the beautiful homegrown eggplant while I went of to the supermarket to fetch him some "regular Joe" eggplant — so he could have his nightshade and eat it too. I reminded him that if he thought our house was Downton Abbey, he had another think coming. Besides, more eggplant would soon be arriving by the bushel. "But I won't be here!" he said. Too bad. I used all the pretty eggplants. I added and substituted a few ingredients, starting with the initial step (learned long ago from both Indian and Italian cuisine) of salting and "weeping" the eggplant slices before cooking. But the best tip in Flay's recipe is to cut the eggplant slices thick. It makes them about 100 times easier to handle. In fact, the grilling method works so well that I now use this as my preliminary method for all eggplant dishes, including the classic eggplant Parmesan. I added the tomato for color and texture variety. Tis is one of those rare salads that might be even better on the second day. Tough I don't want to know about any other addictions, I can proudly say that my son is now a nightshade addict (but is having a bit of trouble fnding Food Network-grade cuisine on campus).