Nightshade Confit

Whether shopping in your own garden or your neighbor’s, or at a farmers market, look for small vegetables for this. You want baby eggplant, either long Asian-​style or smaller Italian globes, picked when the skin is still shiny and the interior seeds are still small. Skinny Italian frying peppers. Sweet garden onions with the green tops still attached. Thin-​skinned cherry tomatoes and zucchini picked well before they explode. I’d avoid those tiny, bland “baby zucchini”; in my experience, zucchini doesn’t develop any personality until adolescence.

Confit is the French term for vegetables cooked in a long, slow, luxurious fat bath. This technique is kind of like a fluid transfusion: as the low heat pulls the vegetables’ natural juices into the sauce, they in turn draw the olive oil up into their veins. Arrange the vegetables artfully into a colorful mosaic after you’ve sautéed them all, because eventually they’ll become too tender to move, and take the cooking slow. After forty-​five minutes, the vegetables will glaze over with exhaustion and be so tender that they can only be shaken in the pan, not stirred. The confit will look like an oil painting—​so shiny and deep and saturated that it can’t absorb another drop.

Don’t let the amount of olive oil scare you off; you can skim it off where it pools at the edges if it feels like too much, but it will function as a preservative if you make this in advance, or store leftovers in the fridge. It keeps for at least a week, getting better by the day. And when you find yourself rushing out the door with a few cold slices of eggplant and pepper riding on a slice of hot toast, the oil dripping down into the gaping bread holes, I truly doubt you’ll regret a single teaspoon.

This recipe was excerpted from 'Company' by Amy Thielen, one of our top cookbooks of 2023. Buy the full book on Amazon.