Tale of Eggplants aka Brinjal aka 'Baingan'

Eggplant.I heard this word first time before my intended trip to US.It was the part of vocabulary list in culture training,prepared for Indians S/W associates traveling to work onsite at US and i was the part of that group.When i first time i heard it,i thought fancy word,I knew it as 'Brinjal' in Indian English and 'Baingan' in Hindi.

Then once i visited the grocery store and bought it first time here in US,calling it eggplant wasn't enough,as i found out at the checking counter when the clerk looked through the long list of laminated sheets.It took him quite a while as most of them don't know what vegetables it is to begin with,so you can guess its not very popular vegetable among Americans.As there are different looks of it.Long and slander ones,which i like and grew up eating in India are called 'Chinese' or Japanese 'Eggplants' in grocery vocab here.Indian version are not as long as their Chinese/Janapense counterparts..Also Indian version came in freckled green or white colors,i have seen only deep purple here.
                             Then you also have round,chubby and plump version of eggplant,you can say Chinese eggplant on steroid, yes 'the eggplant',which is mostly popular among Italian and most of the people here would have eaten it as 'Eggplant Parmigiana' or may be as 'roasted Eggplant dip' or 'Caponata'.Fancy names huh! Wait until i tell you what they are and it will start sounding you all too familiar.Continued the recipe in next post..