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1 eggplant, any size
Bake the eggplant until it's soft. This can be done in the oven or the microwave, or on an open fire or on a grill. Use whatever you've got going.
Let the eggplant cool. If you do this ahead of time, you can refrigerate the eggplant now.
Peel the eggplant. If it's too hot to peel, cut it in half and scoop out the pulp.
Slice it or cut it up crosswise, in pieces about 2" wide. If it's a large eggplant, cut it lengthwise, too.
Put it in the food processor or blender. Squirt it with the lemon juice. Add some of the seasoning and mayonnaise (or do this after it's processed).
Turn on the processor or blender and pulse it, because this goes quickly. When it's just the texture you like, put it in a bowl, taste it and correct the seasoning. If it's bitter (in the US, the purple ones often are) add just a little sweetener (sugar, aspartame, whatever). If it's flat, add seasoning.
Poster's Notes:
For a small eggplant, I use a few squirts of lemon juice, one dash of white pepper, two shakes of garlic powder, one rounded tablespoon of unsweetened mayonnaise, and no salt. For a large eggplant, I do exactly the same thing and then taste it and add whatever is needed. The amount of mayonnaise and lemon juice depends on whether this is to be a salad like this, or a dip, for which you may want to add a little more lemon juice and/or mayonnaise.
I had one this week that was about to go bad, so I peeled it, cut out the soft spot, and microwaved it, and then continued as usual, and it was perfect.
Back when, in Israel, the mayonnaise was less eggy than now, and it was mixed with lemon juice, which was plentiful and not rationed. Some did without the mayo and just used lemon juice, and others did it the traditional way with oil, but oil was rationed, so....
Posted by Carolyn C. Gilboa
Nutritional Info Per Serving: N/A
Lemon juice, to taste and to keep the color
Mayonnaise, to taste
Garlic powder
White pepper, to taste
Salt, if you use it
This is the easiest possible eggplant recipe. It's the way eggplant was often prepared in the kibbutzim in the early '50s, when there were shortages of everything as we grew from 600,000 to a million and a half people, all the newcomers, refugees, arriving with absolutely nothing. I've brought it up to date.