By Dan Costello, made while Jessica was out of town. (Damn it.)

So you take an eggplant, see, and hollow it out like a little canoe… You can see most of the other ingredients there as well. That’s a grapefruit, an apple-Gouda sausage (optional if you’re going veggie), and yes, a habanero pepper. More on that later…

Those ingredients, along with some butter and olive oil, apple cider vinegar, fresh ginger, sea salt and pepper, dance around gently in a cast iron skillet until cooked…

Rub the eggplant generously w/ olive oil, stuff it with the ingredients from the skillet, top w/ some cheese if desired, and bake it! I’m just doing half an eggplant here, so a small Pyrex dish in a toaster oven is my plan…

Into the Cadillac-of-toaster-ovens it goes… 25 min on 250 I’m guessing oughtta do it. I want to cook it enough to soften the eggplant skin (cuz I’m gonna eat the whole thing!) but not so much that it burns or overcooks the stuffing.

Final presentation of this can go a lot of different ways, but if you want to do a pretty plate of it: after you take it out of the oven, cut it crosswise into about 1 1/2 inch wide crescent-moon shaped portions, nestle it down into a little cloud of mashed potatoes or cauliflower purée, and sprinkle with ribbons of Parmesan, or dust with cocoa and cinnamon and nutmeg, or get crazy and drizzle some sriracha and creme fraiche over it…

Then EAT.