Boronia
Photo: Ajna Jai / Contributor
It’s not every day that someone cooks a meal for me and seldom do I remember one for as long as the one my friend Emmy Vest cooked for me early this spring.
Emmy and I worked at Cafe Annie together back in the day, and shortly after I left to open Indika, she went on to run the food division at NASA. We come from totally different cultures (she is of Colombian descent), but we’ve bonded over our immigrant stories, have remained friends ever since. She is one of the few people with whom I can have inexhaustible food conversations.
That afternoon, enjoying a meal at Emmy’s home with cool air coming in from the nearby coast of Galveston, I tasted yet another iteration of my beloved eggplant. Emmy had made boronia, a Colombian concoction of smoked eggplant and plantains peppered with spices. It reminded me of the Punjabi baingan bhartha, but even better.