The Last of Last Year's Tomatoes

The plan for tonight was to launch into the topic of strawberries, a natural starting place for this conversation about home canning since it's how the whole thing got started for me. Last spring I left the farmer's market with a flat of strawberries and no idea how I could possibly eat them all before they went bad. Then I thought about Gran's strawberry jam and wondered why, although I was a confident cook, I had never canned anything. And here we are.

But strawberries will have to wait because I caught a cold, which I mention only because it relates generally to the larger subject of this blog and specifically to the previous post. I came home this afternoon with a hankering for something spicy and warm—not really spring cooking, but more in the vein of a pungent Indian stew. I surveyed the provisions: a bunch of tiny eggplants no bigger than pheasant eggs. A fat Maui onion. A bag of dried chiles. I figured all that would become dinner if stewed with a pint of the 28 pounds of tomatoes I put up last August 20. A friend of mine who saw my cupboard of canned goods downstairs said that if there's ever an earthquake and L.A. shuts down, he's coming to my house. That's the thing about home canning: there's always something to eat.

EGGPLANT STEWED WITH TOMATOES AND SPICE

1 pound tiny eggplants
1 sweet Maui or Vidalia onion
1 pint home-canned tomatoes
garlic
olive oil
salt
dried hot chile peppers
cumin
coriander
black pepper
pimentón de luz —smoked Spanish paprika

1 Rinse, dry and stem the eggplants, leaving them whole if small enough or chunking if larger. Roughly dice the onion. Crush and peel the garlic.

2 Saute the eggplant in hot oil until it begins to brown. Reduce heat and add the onions and several cloves of garlic. Salt well and stir occasionally until they begin to soften. Add the tomatoes with their juice and then throw the spice rack at it: a few dried chiles, a hefty dose of cracked black pepper, half a teaspoon of crushed coriander seed, a little cumin.

3 Cover and simmer for half an hour, until the eggplants are soft through and through. Finish with a pinch of pimentón, which tastes as warm as a terra cotta pot in the sun.

The same general technique works brilliantly with yellow crook-neck squash and yields a lighter dish more in keeping with the early summer table: Chunk the squash and saute in oil until it sweats heavily. Add the chopped onion and a single clove of garlic and, when they start to wilt, season just with salt and crushed coriander seed. Pour in the tomatoes with their juice, cover and stew for about 20 minutes. Finish with a chiffonade of basil leaves.