Zucchini is at its best right now. But how to use it?

Another great and easy recipe to highlight the harvest is caponata,  the Sicilian eggplant dish that can be a salad, a side or even a main dish. Ontario eggplants are beautiful this year, bursting with flavor and colour. As we know, eggplants are mostly water, and need to be cooked at least a little to soften their somewhat bitter profile. But they absorb other flavours well, and marry beautifully with onion, capers and olives.

Traditionally, pine nuts and currants are added to this, but don’t be afraid to add other flavours, textures and veggies to this dish. This is where the zucchini comes in; sauté some beautiful yellow Ontario summer squash, or green zucchini along with your eggplant, tomato and onion, maybe mix in some roasted red pepper too. Instead of pine nuts we added pumpkin seeds and lived to tell the tale.

Some folks like to cook the stuffing out of their veggies and serve their caponata as a sort of stew, but we prefer a lighter hand with the cooking, keeping the integrity of the vegetables and more of their distinct flavours. To be honest the zucchini, while we usually just give it a quick sauté, is just fine cubed and added raw – it has a freshness that works so well with the rich eggplant, and the bright colour it adds makes this salad a beautiful addition to any table.