You know how, when you go to the State Fair, there’s a contest for the biggest vegetables? Apparently the growers at the New York greenmarket didn’t get that memo. That, or they’re determined to differentiate themselves from their Midwestern counterparts by competing to see who can grow the very smallest vegetables.
Some weeks, if you get to the market early, you can buy tiny green and yellow summer squash, perfectly shaped and about the size of my little finger, from Mountain Sweet Berry Farms. Cherry Hill Farms (among others) has had “Fairy Tale” eggplant, each an inch or two long, in lurid, iridescent shades of purple. And tucked in the back corner of the Norwich Meadow Farms stand for the last couple of weeks has been a box of red and yellow sweet Jingle Bell peppers, each about the size of a plum. It’s tempting to buy a couple of boxes of cherry tomatoes and make a teeny tiny ratatouille, but that would be silly.
If you can get over how damn cute the vegetables are, you’ll find they’re quite tasty—the zucchini are sweet and tender with delicate skins, and the eggplant have no seeds or bitterness, so they require less fussing than usual. The trick is to find something to do with them that plays up their diminutive size without getting precious. Cutting them into pieces seems to miss the point, though.
I’ve taken to stuffing the peppers and serving them as appetizers. I cut off the tops and scoop out the seeds with a melon baller or a teaspoon, then fill them with a mixture of rice, herbs, a little garlic, and sautéed ground lamb. A tray goes into the toaster oven until the peppers are cooked through, and voilá, a nice platter of finger food to snack on before dinner. The eggplant I’ve been using in a pasta dish inspired by a recipe in one of the Chez Panisse cookbooks: I cut the trimmed eggplant in half, fry them cut side down in olive oil until they’re brown and soft, and leave them to soften in a bowl with salt, pepper, and a little red wine vinegar. Then I boil up some short pasta—a shape about the same size as the noodles, like cavatappi or penne—and toss it with the eggplant, good olive oil in which I’ve warmed a little garlic and a salt-packed anchovy, maybe some chopped fresh tomatoes, and a few fistfuls of shredded basil for a savory but not-too-rich late summer meal.
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