A new favourite vegetable

I have official changed my favourite vegetable to....wait for it...drum roll...the eggplant.

Perhaps a strange choice- but let me illustrate. An eggplant is versatile because it is not so much the taste itself that is in its power, but the way that it absorbs other flavours. I put it in my Thai-green curry, and my Indian Korma curry. It makes a mean dip flavour and is such a great staple in middle-eastern/Greek cuisine. I even had fried egg-plant at a Japanese restaurant, and it was in that same Japanese Restaurant- mopping up some sort of sweet Japanese mayo with the afore mentioned vegetable- that I realised that it was now at the top of the list.

It used to be the cucumber, but I recently discovered it was technically a fruit (isn't everything!), and besides, since there aren't any cucumbers listening I might as well admit it- eggplant still wins.

I was thinking about vegetables today because I was reading once again Jasper Fforde's "The Fourth Bear"- of which cucumbers play a central role. Jasper Fforde is my favourite author- which is a massive call, but I think he deserves it. I say this with a caution because as much as I love him, he is not every ones cup of tea. He is very weird and not quite logical-and I've had people dislike his books because they don't really make proper sense. His books can't really fit into any genre. They involve very improbably scientific situations- but they aren't Sci-Fi. They are funny, but in a weird- "Belinda thinks it's funny" kind of way. His first series "The Thursday Next" books involve a detective who is in charge of looking at Literature related crimes- inside and outside of Fiction. The "Jack Spratt" series is all about a police department that looks at Nursery Rhyme related crimes.

Jasper Fforde, before starting his Thursday Next series- had been reading up on the Crimean War, and was thinking that would be very interesting in his book- except that his book was set 100 years after the war ended. Then he thought "I'm a fiction writer, I can do anything I want" so he created a 1985 when England was still at War with Russia. From there he created this bizarre alternate universe; where Dodo birds are being genetically re sequenced, time travel is carefully monitored by the government, and some people have the ability to move into the world of fiction. Very, very weird but very, very entertaining

And the best bit was, when me and my fellow groupie friends went to his books signing some four years ago, while I was excited to meet him and perhaps to get to ask him a question (which I did), I figured that I would be disappointed. Surely someone who is so witty and weird in his writing would not be in his personality. But he was! He was funny and clever and fascinating and friendly and I asked him a question about writing which he answered brilliantly. Since then he's always been in my answer for "If you could have dinner with any three people in the world, who would you pick?"

But all this discussion of vegies is making me hunger- and I'm off to the shops, hoping at least one owner is a republican!
B