We received a nice slender violet eggplant in our most recent CSA box. I didn't really know what to do with eggplant and the only thing that came to mind was eggplant parmigiana. I also had a bumper crop of giant basil leaves in our rooftop garden which was just waiting to be made into some of the freshest pesto in town. So I got creative.

First the eggplant. I have no idea how to cook with such an ingredient, so I just made it up. Thickly sliced and salted each piece. Mixed up an egg, with some flour and some water to a pancake like consistency. After dipping the eggplant I fried it up in some saved bacon grease until each was a crispy golden brown.

Meanwhile I had cleaned and trimmed the basil and some flat leaf parsley (both from our roof-top garden). Toasted some pine nuts and crushed a couple cloves of garlic (from our CSA). Put everything in the food processor with some olive oil and some Parmesan cheese. Blended it up until it was a nice pasty green. Also had some angel hair pasta cooking in my big dutch oven next to the frying eggplant.

When the pasta was done, I stirred the raw pesto (I don't usually cook mine cause I like flavors to be extremely bold) into the noodles. We topped the pasta with a couple pieces of eggplant (which was like candy, so smooth and sweet inside with a crunchy fried coating) and some more parm. cheese.

For a side salad, we chopped some red leaf lettuce, an heirloom tomato (we get so many tomatoes from the CSA this time of year we try to incorporate therm everywhere we can so they don't go bad before we can finish them), some small cucumbers (the first from our garden), some finely chopped onion and dressed it up with some Tarragon Dijon dressing.

Ingredients in this meal which came from our CSA share:
-eggplant
-heirloom tomato
-garlic
-onion

Ingredients in this meal which came from our roof-top garden:
-giant leaves of basil
-flat leaf parsley
-cucumbers