Ideas for the Veg dish

I apologize for the funny formatting, I'm not on my own computer and that makes it harder.....
Stuffed eggplant:

could stuff it with the insides of the eggplant, breadcrumbs, egg, herbs, tomato or roasted tomato, cheese. Gets served kind of like a little boat, garnished with toasted pine nuts and some kind of sauce (I would like a mild garlic sauce, but I’m guessing that won’t fly. Tomato sauce probably would, and this is the one that reminds me the most of eggplant parm in the first place.)



Variation on stuffed eggplant:

We could up the ante a little by flavoring it with ginger and cardamom instead of garlic, parsley, and rosemary. I don’t think this one will happen.



Braised veggie:

Something like a braised fennel or leek could provide the kind of “central item” that this dish needs. There could be a whole variety of ways to serve this....



-braised fennel, roasted eggplant, potato puree, pine nuts, mint

-braised leek, sauteed mushrooms, herbed polenta, mushroom sauce, walnuts, rosemary

-braised fennel, sauteed radicchio, chickpeas, sauce(?)

-braised leeks, eggplant puree, chickpeas, parmesan, fresh cherry tomato



These dishes strike me as pretty generic, they rely completely on very common Italian ingredients, and the techniques are not fancy. I feel like we could step further out of the box with this dish, but its probably better to play it safe and just do something easy and good. I don’t think anyone wants to add more work to their prep time, so anything that takes much longer to make than an eggplant parmesan is probably out. One thing I like about all these dishes is that they are wintery and have a little more substance to them. I’m leaning towards the radicchio one just because it seems to have the best balance of flavors (braised fennel and leeks both are really sweet dishes to me), and so I’m going to try making it for lunch tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it turns out, and if it goes well I might take that to the chef as a proposal....