domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

Maura, about three months ago, discovered ice skating. Ever since then, she’s been begging (and begging, and begging) for me to take her skating. She, like little kids everywhere, was totally convinced that the moment she set foot on the ice, she’d be like a ballerina in skates. (Note: she has also tried to be a ballerina without skates. Maybe predictably, that didn’t go so well, either.)

So last night I finally sucked it up and took her to Kent State’s ice rink–public skate from 5:30-7:30, ridiculously expensive for two people. She can run around on skates just fine, it turns out, so long as you don’t try to put her on the ice. Put her on the ice, and she’s like a just-born four-legged creature, tangling its legs and falling over. And falling over again. And falling over some more. She was totally delighted, though, and now I’m wondering if it’d be worth it to invest $95 in skating lessons for her–there’s a session starting in mid-March that she could probably join, and it might be nice for her to have something to do once a week.

Pleasingly, I did not fall over. I hadn’t skated in probably fifteen years, so I was sort of paranoid–fifteen years ago, I was much smaller and more limber than I am now. My first go around the rink, I was sure my feet were going to fall off, and then I realized that it was because my skates were too small. Duh, self. I got a size larger, and was able to do things like go in a straight line, turn around, and spin three or four times in a circle before getting dizzy enough that I had to stop. Maura was terribly, hilariously impressed. I got on the ice without falling over: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” I stopped without crashing into a wall: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” I skated ten feet in front of her and turned around to tow her: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” It was pretty adorable.

Of course, having been home for several hours, I’m now feeling the effects of both the initial too-small skates and the surprising difficulty of towing one’s eighty-pound child around the ice for an hour and a half. Ow, my ankles.

When we got home, Maura went to bed and I decided that what I needed more than anything else was pesto pasta and sauteed eggplant. As I was eating, I remembered that I promised Jules I’d post a recipe for eggplant sometime, so here we go.

This is the thing about the eggplant recipe I’m about to give you: it’s not pretty. I mean really, it’s unattractive. That’s why there’s no picture. (Also, I was too lazy to get the camera, but not the point.) Nick and I call this eggplant sludge–it’s very, very tasty, but…well. Sludgy.

Anyhow. Heat some olive oil in a skillet, and add a thinly-sliced onion. Cook that over low for a while. While the onion is cooking, take your eggplant and peel it. Cut it into slabs, then lay them out and salt them quite heavily. Let them sit for about ten minutes to draw out some of the bitterness, then rinse them off and cut them into cubes. Add them to the pan.

Here, I peel about two heads (yes, heads) of garlic, chop off the bottoms, and add them to the pan. If you are not totally wild about garlic, you can use less garlic than I do. A lot less garlic than I do. Throw the garlic in.

Eggplant soaks up oil–make sure that there’s still a little in the bottom of the pan, else this will stick and you’ll never get your pan clean. (Here, never means maybe someday, but not until you’ve spent many hours cursing and chipping away at the gunk on the bottom of the pan.)

This is the part of the recipe where you can do whatever you want. Add a tablespoon or two of lemon juice to the pan. Then figure out what else you have in the cupboard that’d about to go off. I suggest roasted peppers of any color, mushrooms, spinach, and/or tomatoes. Chop them and add them to the pan, then let it cook until the eggplant is very, very soft and browned. You can dump this over pasta or rice and call it a day.

Definitely not health food–I wasn’t joking when I said that eggplant soaks up oil–but delicious.