At the vegetable market last week, a man was there selling eggplant for $.50 a pound. A pretty good deal if you ask me and you can figure out how to cook it! So I bought a few of the lovely dark purple veggies and headed home with no specific plan in mind other than to get my kids to eat them.

I did a little research and decided that roasted eggplant sounded tasty, and surely the kids would eat it. They're pretty good about eating whatever we give them. I want my kids to be a little less picky than I was growing up. You see, I hated canned peas, but my mom loved them. We had a handful of other veggies with dinner - canned green beans, mashed potatoes, carrots, salad...not much else.

To start off, I simply diced the eggplant. I cut 1/2 inch or so rings and then cut each one into smaller 1/2 inch cubes. I tossed it with a little bit of oil, some garlic granules, salt and pepper and placed it on the silicone mat on my cookie sheet. I then stuck it in the toaster oven at 400 F until it was cooked - which was about 30 minutes. Eggplant is like a sponge so it will soak up as much oil as you give it, so don't feel like you have to keep going until it looks oily. Just a few tablespoons spread on the cookie sheet (without a silicone mat) should be enough to keep it from sticking.

Served nice and hot, this is a pretty tasty vegetable. The people at the market were all commenting on how tasty these particular eggplants were and I'm pretty sure they were right. It's flavorful and cooks up nicely. Of course, when I gave it to the kids, some of them didn't think it looked very good, but all of them ate the eggplant just fine! I am happy to have another vegetable that we can add to our meals. Just don't give us any onions...that's one that we say no to! Ha!

After our meal, my mom texted me and said they were heading to get some Tex-Mex. I told her that sounded good and told her what we had eaten which included eggplant. She said, "Ew, gross. I wouldn't eat that." I told her that the kids did and they liked it. She was shocked and said she had never had eggplant before. Yep, it was definitely not one of the veggies I had growing up at dinner, but, like I said, we want our kids to be able to eat a healthy variety. And this eggplant was tasty!!

Have you ever had eggplant?