Eggplant Meatballs

Aiden turned one year old this week.

Mama threw him a party like he was getting his doctorate. Two days of cooking. Helium balloons — not the cheap kind, the real kind that float up to the ceiling and stay there. A cake from the bakery on Gratiot that she has been going to since before I was born, with a little basketball on the top because Cheryl Carter had decided somewhere around month three of Brianna’s pregnancy that this boy was going to be an athlete. I did not vote on this. Neither did Aiden. The basketball was already decided.

The whole family showed up. Dad sat in his recliner — yes, Mama moved the recliner into the dining room, because Ronald Carter does not sit in dining room chairs if there is a recliner within fifty feet — and held Aiden on his lap while the baby grabbed at his glasses with both hands. Keisha came straight from work, still in her city clothes, spent most of the party on her phone, and then hugged Aiden so hard on her way out that he made a sound like a squeeze toy. Darius brought his girlfriend Tanya, who is quiet and patient and the opposite of Darius in every possible way, which is clearly why it works. And Marc came. Lil Marc, twenty-one years old, showed up forty-five minutes late with a stuffed giraffe taller than I am and a story about traffic on the Lodge that nobody believed for a second. Within ten minutes of walking in, he had Aiden laughing so hard the baby almost fell off the couch. That’s Marc. He walks into a room and the room gets lighter.

Gloria — Brianna’s mother — was there too. Gloria and Mama in the same room is what scientists would call a controlled reaction: everything looks stable on the surface, but if you look closely at the instruments, all the readings are elevated. Gloria made a comment about Aiden’s organic snack pouches. Mama smiled at her the way you smile at something you are choosing not to respond to. The rest of us found somewhere else to be.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to, two days later. The thing I can’t stop thinking about.

My dad grilled burgers in the backyard.

He has a Weber kettle that is older than me. I don’t know exactly how old it is, but I know it was on that back porch when I was learning to walk, and it looks exactly the same as it did then: black, round, a little scorched around the lid, a grate that has seen a thousand cookouts. Dad treats that grill the way he treats his workstation at the plant — with precision, with respect, like it matters how you do this. He lit the charcoal himself. He arranged the coals himself. He seasoned the patties himself with salt, black pepper, and garlic powder, nothing else, pressing them out with the heel of his hand to exactly the right thickness. And then he stood at that grill for forty-five minutes and did not let a single person touch it.

I watched him from the back steps. I watched the way he timed the flip — not checking, not poking, just knowing. I watched him move those patties from the hot side to the cool side like he was managing a line at the plant, everything in the right position, nothing rushed, nothing wasted. The burgers came out perfect. Charred on the outside, pink in the middle, the kind of burger that doesn’t need anything on it but gets everything anyway because you earned it.

And I realized, standing on those back steps, that I have never once grilled a burger. Not once in my life. I have eaten probably a thousand of my father’s burgers, and I have never made one myself. I have never once stood at a grill and done what he does. I have just shown up and eaten and gone home.

I called Mama the next morning. I do this now when something is sitting with me — I call her, she answers, she listens, she tells me what to do. It’s a whole system.

“I want to learn to make burgers,” I told her.

“You don’t need to learn burgers right now,” she said. “You need to learn hamburger steaks.”

I did not know there was a difference. There is a difference. Mama explained it to me like I was a reasonable adult who just happened to be missing several decades of kitchen knowledge, which is exactly what I am. A hamburger steak is ground beef, shaped into a patty, but you cook it in a pan — and then you smother it. You make a gravy right in that same pan, onions and beef broth and a little flour to thicken it up, and you let those patties finish cooking in the gravy so they pull up all the flavor from the bottom of the pan. You serve it over rice. It’s what Mama made on nights when the budget was tight and she needed to feed four kids something that felt like a full meal. It’s what her mother made in Louisiana. It’s the kind of food that doesn’t photograph well and tastes like home.

“Your father loves that dish,” she told me. “I haven’t made it in a while. You learn it, you can make it for him sometime.”

I wrote everything down. I went to the grocery store. I came home to my apartment — the one I share with Brianna and Aiden, the one that is quiet at 10 PM when Aiden finally sleeps and we finally sit down and stop moving — and I made hamburger steaks for the first time.

I burned the first two patties because I had the heat too high. Smoke alarm went off. Brianna came in from the other room and looked at the pan and looked at me and said “babe” in that voice that means she is trying to be supportive but is also a little concerned. I turned the heat down. I started over. I made the gravy slowly, the way Mama said, letting the onions go soft before I added anything else, scraping up the brown bits from the bottom of the pan because “that’s the flavor, DeShawn, don’t you throw that away.”

The second attempt was different. The onions went sweet and soft. The broth came up dark and rich. The patties finished in the gravy and soaked it up and got tender in a way that a grilled burger never gets. I served it over white rice with a piece of cornbread from the box mix because I am not ready to make cornbread from scratch yet and I am at peace with that.

Brianna tried it and said, “This tastes like your mama’s.”

I know it didn’t, not really. Mama’s is thirty years of practice and a cast iron pan that has been seasoned since the Carter administration. Mine is a week-old nonstick from Walmart and three phone calls asking what I did wrong. But close enough. Close enough is a start.

Aiden is one year old. I’ve been somebody’s dad for one year. I’m learning. Everything I’m doing right now — the team lead position, the cooking, showing up at 5:30 AM and trying to do it the right way — all of it is learning. My dad has been doing his version of this for thirty-one years and he still stood at that grill like it was the first time it mattered. Maybe that’s the whole thing. Maybe it always matters the first time, and you just keep making it the first time.

Here’s how I make the hamburger steaks now. The second time, not the first.

After that birthday cookout I kept thinking about what my dad said — that the food doesn’t have to be the same every time, it just has to mean something every time. Aiden’s mama had been talking about eating lighter, and I wanted to prove I could put that same love into something that wasn’t ground beef and gravy. Eggplant meatballs sounded like a dare, honestly — meatballs with no meat — but the roasting, the mashing, the shaping with your hands, all of it felt like the kind of cooking that asks something of you. And when I pulled them out of the oven and she said they tasted real, I knew I’d found another dish worth making the first time, again and again.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 50 min | Total Time: 1 hr | Servings: 20

Ingredients

1/4 cup olive oil
2 pounds eggplant (3 medium or 2 large, about 12 cups diced into 1/2-inch pieces)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon jarred sun-dried tomatoes, finely chopped
1 1/4 cups Italian panko (use gluten free as needed)*
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese (not shredded)
Freshly ground black pepper
For serving, 1 large jar marinara sauce, 8 to 12 ounces spaghetti or bucatini pasta or zucchini noodles

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dice the eggplant. Cut the eggplant into 1/2-inch chunks by slicing 1/2-inch rings and then cutting the rings into cubes. The size of dice is important for the final texture! (If you weren’t able to weigh the eggplant, measure out 12 cups 1/2-inch diced).
Toss with oil. In a large bowl, quickly mix the eggplant with olive oil and kosher salt (the eggplant soaks up the oil in an instant, so mix as soon as you add it!). Pour the eggplant onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and spread it into an even layer.
Roast the eggplant. Roast for 25 minutes, then stir and roast 10 minutes more until browned and very tender. Remove and reduce the oven heat to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mash and mix. Add the warm eggplant to a bowl and mash it with a potato masher until chunky and mostly mashed. Stir in the minced garlic, finely chopped sundried tomatoes, Italian panko and grated Parmesan cheese. Taste and add any salt to taste (we added only 1 pinch; remember that the marinara sauce will also add flavor after baking).
Form the meatballs. Use your hands to form the dough into 20 balls. You’ll include the eggplant skin right into the balls: try to evenly disperse them throughout each meatball. You can also discard a few of the skins if it’s hard to form the balls. But the skins and chewy parts are what you need for a meaty, interesting texture: so don’t worry that it’s not a smooth dough! See the photos above.
Bake the meatballs. Place the meatballs on a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake 18 to 20 minutes until lightly browned on top and very browned on the bottom. Allow to cool for 5 minutes, or longer if desired (the balls will firm up). At this point, you can serve immediately, refrigerate for 1 week or freeze for up to 3 months (in a single layer in a freezer safe container). While the meatballs bake, you can boil the pasta or prep the zucchini noodles.
Serve. To serve, add the marinara sauce to a skillet and add the meatballs in a single layer. Heat for 1 to 2 minutes until warmed. Serve over the noodles, then top with grated Parmesan cheese (and chopped fresh basil, if desired). You can also serve as a vegetarian main dish with a few sides, like broccoli and couscous, rice or quinoa.

Nutrition (per serving)

Eggplant Meatballs — Learning to Make Something That Matters