Sunday, April 6, 2014

Planning for Failure

This afternoon, I planted three Ichiban eggplants which will hopefully grow and provide us with lots of great dishes this summer.  Last summer I had three Ichiban eggplants and we were literally swimming in eggplants.  I'm pretty sure I composted and give away more than we ate.  Clearly, we had too many eggplants.

So why did I choose again to plant three eggplants?  Simple.  I always plan for failure.

You can bet that, should I ever actually cut down my initial grow to just two or even one eggplant, something will happen to them and I will end up with less than I need, or worse -- none.  That's virtually guaranteed, with Murphy's Law being what it is.

And so I choose gross excess over deprivation, which would be bad, if it were anything other than vegetables.  Hard to argue that too many veggies are bad.

6 comments:

  1. I make eggplant lasagna or eggplant parmesan & always have extra. I usually wind up freezing over 1/2 of each. If I remember to pull it out of the freezer on time, it's a great treat to have in the winter time.

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    1. Gosh, I freeze everything else, I had not thought about freezing the excess eggplant. Fantastic idea! I love both dishes and often think how nice they'd be in winter.

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  2. Ah I'm so excited for real eggplant! My favorite are the little Japanese eggplant. I half them and grill them. You're wise to anticipate curve balls...they seem especially prevalent in vegetable gardening!

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    1. Oh....the taste of grilled eggplant. I just love it; it's so tender once it's been on the barbecue! I probably need to shore up my eggplant recipes so I can fix more recipes with it, a good friend actually reminded me recently that I could make hummus with it, which I intend to try this summer. I love hummus and there's no reason to buy it when I'm growing the main ingredient right here. Duh, right?

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    2. Yes! I actually HATE chickpea hummus but there's a Sicilian hummus-like dish I make called caponata with eggplant and roasted tomato that is SO good.

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    3. That's the one my friend was talking about! I can't wait to make it!

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