Eggplant for One, or, What I Eat Most Nights, Really

I have been struggling with something—the solitary state in which I live and eat. Truthfully, I’m not alone. I have a boyfriend, and a family with whom I host frequent phone calls, and I live with three roommates, and attend work each day at a bustling restaurant. But my meals, for the most part, are eaten alone, or balanced on a notebook while I write down the restaurant’s daily menu additions, or wolfed down in transit from work to evening class.

I moved to Boston to attend the Gastronomy program at BU, and this upcoming Fall, have made the decision to transfer into the Culinary program at the University. As September rolls closer and I start to anticipate with nervous excitement all the new cooking skills I will gain, and the talents I will be able to bring to the table, I am ashamed to admit that though I cook nightly, every night in fact, my meals are truly unremarkable, and I love them all unconditionally. I wonder if it’s ok to aspire to be a food writer and a chef, to plan dinner parties in my head with elaborate dishes and desserts, but settle in each evening to a lonely potato and a glass of wine, and feel entirely sated.

I suppose I can at least congratulate myself for not falling into a cycle of constant take-out or microwave dinners. I leave an eight-hour server shift with the desire to cook still intact; a want to prepare and serve a meal entirely for myself, and there is something lovely in that. Cooking for one, however, has changed how I cook. I rarely make meals that seem silly for one, or that would mean too many leftovers. If I bake a loaf of bread, half of it goes into the freezer. I only make a pizza or a casserole when I can guarantee guests. The beautiful bunch of kale I brought home from the market is not a vegetable but a pact; a commitment to eat the greens routinely, almost religiously, in soups, and salads, and sautéed, until it is gone, never letting the leaves turn yellow from a single evening of neglect. At some point I accidentally became a vegetarian, and then decided on pescatarian instead. I eat a lot of eggs—hard boiled, poached, or scrambled.

“When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove-top cook’s strongest ally,” says Laurie Colwin in her essay, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. “I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over I ate it cold the next day on bread…I looked forward to nights alone. I would stop to buy my eggplant and some red peppers. At home I would fling off my coat, switch on the burner under my teakettle, slice up the eggplant, and make myself a cup of coffee.”

The likeness to my own routine described by Colwin stopped me in my tracks. I think I even let out an audible gasp in the stacks of the Brookline library where I like to spend my free time rummaging through the massive collection of cookbooks and food memoirs. The only difference is that I don’t drink coffee; I boil the water each evening for tea instead, and have developed a ridiculous habit of drinking tepid tea with my meals. But I too eat eggplant nearly every night. There is a chapter in one of my favorite cookbooks, Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty, devoted entirely to the aubergine, and entitled "The Mighty Eggplant." It boasts beautiful recipes for Soba noodles with eggplant and mango and Eggplant croquettes and Eggplant with buttermilk sauce, and yet I make these recipes rarely, feasting instead on the photos.

I sauté my eggplant with shitake mushrooms and tofu, toss roasted aubergine with arugula and perhaps a poached egg, or stir fry eggplant, sweet potato, chickpeas and onion and top them all with cinnamon and chili powder and love the silky eggplant flesh and sweet onions and potatoes that melt in my mouth. None of these dishes seem particularly exciting or dignified enough to serve to guests, or even remotely picturesque. For such a brilliantly purple vegetable, the eggplant cooks down to a delicious but entirely unimpressive, and unphotogenic, brown.

I don’t eat my eggplant at the table but hover over my desk, examining homework assignments and often spilling tea onto what I am working on. That’s what I’m doing this evening, in fact, working hard and late against a deadline for an essay about, well, eggplant, and its role as the scapegoat in several food authors' memoirs. The eggplant is a porous vegetable, taking on the flavor of whatever it’s cooked in, and diligently absorbing the frustrations of these writers. I know what you’re thinking: you’re on a deadline and yet you’ve put your effort into typing up this absurdly long blogpost instead of just finishing your homework a bit earlier? Yeah, it’s called productive procrastination. But tonight I am doing something a bit different—I am letting someone else do the majority of the writing for this post. Jenni Ferrari-Adler compiled a book called Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone and is excerpted here because she has deftly put into words what I have been struggling with since moving to Boston this past winter: the simultaneous loneliness and secret comfort of cooking for one.

Call it seven-thirty on a Wednesday night. No one else is home. A slight hunger hums in your body, so you wander into the kitchen. In front of the window a plant’s stems wave like arms from their hanging basket. In the pantry bin, potatoes eye the onions slipping out of their skins. An apron hangs from the closet door like a shadow of a companion. Reflexively, you open the refrigerator and nod at the condiments, grasp the hot sauce, and close the others back into cold darkness. Bottle of sauce in hand, you gaze around the room, inspecting the contents of the cabinets, the pile of paper menus from nearby restaurants, the spines of your cookbooks. You turn from the bookshelf and catch a glimpse of yourself in the window. In the heat, your hair puffed wildly. You experience one of those weird lost minutes inside your head. Loneliness, you think, loneliness with its lyrical sound; you look like a lone lioness…

“A potato,” I told my brother, when he asked what I’d eaten for dinner. “Boiled, cubed, sautéed with olive oil, sea salt, and balsamic vinegar.”

“That’s it?” he asked. He was one to talk. He’d enjoyed what he called “bachelor’s taco night” for three dinners and counting.

“A red cabbage, steamed, with hot sauce and soy sauce,” I said the following night.

“Do you need some money?” he asked.

But it wasn’t that, or it wasn’t only that. I liked to think of myself not as a student on a budget, but rather as a peasant, a member of a group whose eating habits, across cultures, had long appealed to me.

“Are you full?” my brother asked.

“Full enough,” I said.

“What about protein?”

Later that week, I diced two onions and sautéed them until they turned translucent and transformed the kitchen with their comforting smell. Flanked by books and magazines, I ate straight out of the pot at the table, my knees curled up to my chest. Aimee Mann sang from the stereo: One is the loneliest number. Everything, I realized, growing light-headed, anything was delicious. In the next weeks I continued on in phases, first everything raw, then everything baked. I prioritized condiments. What wasn’t delicious with Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce?

One night, I invited a few people from my program to dinner. For them, I made a salad with romaine lettuce, radishes, string beans, scallions, homemade croutons, and goat cheese. For them, I served dessert—pistachio nuts and chocolate chips in ramekins, a combination discovered via random out-of-cabinet consumption. At my nudging, surely, the conversation turned to the topic of cooking for ourselves. One woman’s solitary dish was spaghetti carbonara. It satisfied her cravings for bacon, eggs, and pasta, and it made good leftovers. One man mixed couscous with canned soup. We agreed that dividing recipes by four was depressing, and that in cooking for ourselves, presentation went out the window.

When I considered it later, though, I had to admit I liked my personal presentation: the red pot with the flat wooden serving spoon, a half sheet of paper towel for a napkin. I liked my mismatched thrift-store plates, chopsticks, and canning jars. I even liked, I’m sorry to say, eating sandwiches while walking to class.

There was a real pleasure to be had eating ice cream out of the container and pickles out of a glass jar, standing up at the counter…

Because cooks love the social aspect of food, cooking for one is intrinsically interesting. A good meal is like a present, and it can feel goofy, at best, to give yourself a present. On the other hand, there is something life affirming in taking the trouble to feed yourself well, or even decently. Cooking for yourself allows you to be strange or decadent or both…

My book is by no means a suggestion to eat alone; even the most community minded among us must occasionally find ourselves hungry and alone in the house. There are various reasons for solitary dining, only some of them a result of loss in its numerous forms. We adjust to solitude and an increased responsibility for caring for ourselves as we grow older, as we leave home for the first time, as we move, as our circumstances change. We dine alone once or for a brief time or for a long time.

I’m interested in finding out what happens then. Do we hold to the same standards that apply to cooking for others? Usually not, it seems. I’m interested in why.

In “Making Soup in Buffalo,” Beverly Lowry writes: “The fact was I wanted the same thing again and again. And so I yielded, bought the goods, took them home, cooked, ate, accompanied usually by music, preferably a public radio station that played music I liked. And I am here to tell you, the pleasure never diminished. I was happy every time.”

Every time I read those sentences, I take a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. Good, I think. I’ll make the same weird meal I’ve been making all week—half a loaf of seven-grain bread sliced and slathered with tahini and honey—again tonight. It’s what I want. It’s delicious and filling…

           Allow me to recommend Fage Total 0% Greek yogurt with one teaspoon of honey mixed in. The honey does something not only to the flavor but to the texture of the yogurt, making it sublimely creamy and sweet. I like to use the teaspoon to eat the dessert out of the container. While I eat, I daydream about the dinner parties I will throw in the shimmering future, when I will serve this yogurt-and-honey creation in champagne glasses and be applauded for my culinary brilliance.

            But for now, eating this in bed by myself is not merely fine, it is sweet.

--Jenni Ferrari-Adler, introduction to Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, 2007.

And now, as long as I’m being entirely honest, I have decided to post all the photos of solitary meals that were documented but never published because they looked too bland, one note, boring and repetitive. These are the dishes, friends, mostly eggplant based, that I eat reliably nearly every evening, and they seem so unremarkable when photographed, but wholly filling in the moment.