Eggplant

This is a fat, stuffed vegetable sandwich that’s great for a picnic. The olive tapenade is also good spooned on bread toasts and served as an hors d’oeuvre.

This salad is wonderful served warm or at room temperature with French bread and a green salad.

This is a wonderful Greek-style one-dish meal or a side dish for a party. Roasting brings out the flavors of the vegetables. You can prepare all the vegetables except the potatoes ahead of time.

This basic, versatile recipe can be adapted to just about any vegetable depending on what you have on hand. While the oven preheats, prepare the vegetables. Serve with oven-grilled chicken breasts and steamed rice.

Here’s a soup for late summer when eggplants, tomatoes, and red peppers are luscious and ripe. Top the soup with a dollop of plain yogurt and pesto for added zip.

Serve small wedges as an appetizer or large wedges for a vegetarian main dish.

Eggplant, zucchini, sweet onions, and tomatoes all roasted together thicken by themselves to make a deeply flavored sauce for pasta. It’s a meal that’s ready in less than half an hour.

When summer is in full swing and there are mounds of beautiful purple eggplants available, here’s a wonderfully refreshing salad you can make. Since the eggplant is poached rather than fried, it is a light and healthful dish. The flavors and textures of the eggplant, onion, and potato are harmonious, but you can use fewer or no potatoes and more eggplant.

We remember falling in love with a photograph of petits farcis in an old issue of Cuisine e Vins de France We're sure that most chefs of our age who dreamed of cooking professionally since childhood feel the same when they open a vintage copy of Cuisine et Vins de France, or of Georges Blanc's De La Vigne à l'Assiette. There is not greater food era than when Michel Guérard, Bernard Loiseau, Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Georges Blanc and Roger Vergé were at the top. Petits Farcis are vegetables stuffed with sausage mix, then baked and eaten lukewarm. We make them in the summer when the growers show up with pattypan squashes. What else are you supposed to do with those little squashes other than admire them? The stuffed vegetables are awesome with a mâche salad and partner perfectly with a nice rosé or pastis. Get the smallest vegetables you can find, about the size of a gold ball.

Top sirloin, flank steak, or skirt steak work just as well as eye round in this Thai-inspired dish.

A twist on ratatouille, this beautifully constructed casserole swaps out tomatoes for sweet potatoes.

These flavorful frites are not only a clever riff on a fried standard, they're also lamb's best friend. The Middle Eastern accents in the za'atar spice blend pair well with the gamey meat and intensify the eggplant’s flavor. After many experiments, Terzo Piano chef Meg Colleran Sahs discovered that a rice-flour coating resulted in the highest crunch factor.

I have eaten several versions of these eggplant fritters, which are a specialty of Córdoba, and have loved them all. The combination of savory and sweet is sensational. In the town of Priego de Córdoba, which is in the mountains on the Ruta del Califato (the tourist route of old Muslim Spain), where there is an old Moorish quarter, the eggplant slices I ate were very thin and crisp and served with a dribble of honey. I learned from the chef at the restaurant Rio a new way to prevent the eggplant from absorbing too much oil, which is to soak the slices in milk, then drain them and cover them in flour.
These are best eaten as soon as they are done, but they are also very good reheated in the oven.

Japanese eggplants have thin skins and few seeds, just meaty, flavorful flesh that transforms into tender, creamy textured, fragrant, smoky goodness when grilled. The classic way to enjoy this dish is with just soy sauce or Ponzu and a mound of katsuobushi, dried shaved bonito flakes (a type of tuna). The dressing below is more contemporary but also fantastic. Either way, get your hands on these eggplants and grill them.

Skewering and grilling whole garlic cloves gives this vibrant sauce its smoky sweetness. Make the salsa as chunky or as smooth as you like.

I can't think of a more rustically elegant (is that a contradiction in terms?) starter. Serve with some robust white bread or pita and you are, literally, in food heaven. In the recipe you'll find Sami Tamimi's technique for getting the seeds out of the pomegranate, which I am afraid is now a very well-known secret.

Serve with pasta, polenta, or rice. Accompany with steamed broccoli or braised escarole or kale.

This hearty, veggie-filled rigatoni recipe requires a little bit of work, but makes plenty for a group and is full of flavor.