Eggplant Salad

For dinner tonight, I made an eggplant salad. When cooking keto, or any diet, just think about what you can have, what you shouldn’t have, and create tasty dishes without having to rely on a recipe.

I had one large eggplant and here’s how what I fixed.

First, I quarter grape or cherry tomatoes. Tomatoes do have carbs – 5 net carbs in one cup. I doubt we even ate 1/8th of a cup of tomatoes.

Next I caramelized onions and poured them on top of the tomatoes. The hot onions will warm the tomatoes and cause them to release a little juice.

Then I seared red and yellow peppers and poured them on top of the onions.

Next, browned garlic was added.

Sliced olives were added. It could be green or black olives. Tonight I added green.

Then I added salt and pepper. When cooking the eggplant, I added salt and pepper to that so I didn’t want to add more salt to the eggplant.

For the eggplant, I peeled it, cut it into chunks, salted it and let it sit for about 20 minutes, rinsed it, dried it with a towel, and seared it in hot olive oil. Once it was cooked through, I poured it into the bowl with the other ingredients.

Once it was all stirred up, I added a little olive oil and once it was put into serving bowls, we each added our own balsamic.

I love the Garlic Cilantro Balsamic. Vince doesn’t like cilantro so he was going to choose a different flavor but ended up using the Garlic Cilantro.

The best part . . we have a quart jar full of leftovers! We have leftover grilled chicken so one night, I’ll heat up the chicken, heat up the eggplant salad and we’ll have chicken/eggplant salad. I’ll probably serve it over a bowl of salad greens.

I could have added celery or roasted pecans or walnuts. You can really add anything you want to add — just get creative!