Recipe of the Week: Eggplant Dirty Rice (by "Amateur Gourmet")

It was hard to think about making dinner every night when Zach was out painting the Seurat mural. So we were harvesting all these beautiful eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers from our garden and just leaving them out on the kitchen counter.

Last night, we decided to use our bountiful harvest to make one of our favorite vegetarian dishes -- eggplant dirty rice, a recipe I love from the Amateur Gourmet site. I followed much of Adam's recipe, except I threw in about 3 or 4 of our tomatoes and used half white, half brown rice. The tomatoes release quite a bit of liquid, so if you are using only white rice, you might need to adjust the amount of broth you add. But if you are using brown rice, you can keep the broth at 2.5 cups. I also skipped the oven and just cooked the rice on the stove. If you like to use your oven, check out the temperature and time Adam used here.

Ingredients
1/4 cup olive oil
2 green bell peppers, seeded and diced
1 onion, finely chopped
3 celery ribs, diced
1 medium eggplant, or 3 small eggplants, diced into 1/2 inch cubes
3-4 tomatoes, diced
5 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tbsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground white pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne
1 tbsp tomato paste
1/4 cup soy sauce
1.5 cups rice (I used both white and brown)
2.5 cups vegetable broth
salt, to taste

Directions
In a cast iron pot, heat olive oil and cook celery, peppers, and onion  until lightly browned.

Add eggplant, garlic, tomatoes, thyme, black and white peppers, cayenne, and season with salt. Cook for about 8 minutes or until eggplant is soft.
Stir in tomato paste, soy sauce, and vegetable broth.
Bring mixture to a boil, then cover and simmer for 20 minutes.

Let stand for 10 more minutes, then fluff with a fork and serve hot!