I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking lately, for various reasons, but one of the reasons is that in the summer when the farmer’s market is overflowing, looking at cookbooks rarely yields recipes that make maximum advantage of the ingredients I have, and I haven’t been feeling independently inspired or desirous of going shopping for random things I don’t have.

Today, though, I was looking at the eggplant in my fridge and thinking “I remember that Spanish cooking blog where they rolled up eggplant into little tubes of something. Maybe that would be good, but I want to make something more substantial…”

Anyway, I ended up consulting Veganomicon to see if they had anything like that. They did, but it is much too complicated for a weeknight. But that woke up my imagination and I started thinking about how to using a couple things in my fridge to make something similar, but easier: baked thin slices of eggplant with tomato sauce and tofu ricotta. Which handily gets rid of the extra canned tomatoes and the tofu that badly needed to be used.

I don’t know how it’ll turn out yet because it’s still in the oven, but it was nice to be reminded that cookbooks are useful for inspiration, even if you end up making something quite different to take maximum advantage of what you have.

My lunch today was similar, just something I threw together after looking at the fridge: arugula, tomato, and cucumber salad with cilantro. Grapes for dessert. And a Dapple Dandy pluot for snack while I wait for the eggplant. Yum. Some things don’t need any help being good.