I like eggplant, but I do get pretty bored with it sometimes. Grilled eggplant, ratatouille and my few other ideas for preparing it get worn out pretty quickly. And forget anything that asks for it to be sauteed or cooked in oil, since I can never manage to prevent the eggplant from soaking up the oil like a sponge. So when I saw a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s site for steamed eggplant, I thought I’d give it a whirl, and it turned out pretty well. The recipe feeds four people at 97 cents per serving.

Start with some small eggplant, or if you can only find large ones, quarter the eggplants instead of only cutting them in half. Also, the recipe specifies cooking them in your steamer cut side up, but we tried it both ways, and it didn’t seem to make any difference at all. Just toss ‘em in and get them cooking.

Next, make your dressing. It’s straightforward: cut and mix. I think you could mess around with this a little bit, too. The recipe is a good starting point, but I think you could, for instance, leave out the celery leaves and chili sauce, or use some different herbs. For me, the key ingredients are the soy sauce and the heat, for the saltiness/umami and, well, the heat. The basil is always a good choice for eggplant, too. Like I said, this recipe is great, and a good start, but I think you can adapt the method of the steamed eggplant, then dressing it while it’s hot so they soak up flavors, to all sorts of dressings.

You’ve also got lots of choices on how you serve this. It works well warm as a side dish, it could be a good cold salad, and I think it would be a great tapa or appetizer on top of some toasted crusty bread (reminding me of escalivada).