Eggplant
There are so many different varieties of this beautiful vegetable. Which kind to use in which recipe?
In Oriental supermarkets like H Mart, you'll find circular eggplants, from golf ball size down to pea. They are never purple but come in white or pale green. These are the eggplants to use in Thai curries.
The long pale banana-shaped eggplants that fade from violet to white at the stalk are used in Japanese dishes.
But the common eggplant, that huge purple teardrop, is the vegetable for European, American and Middle Eastern dishes, like Baba Ghanouj or Italian Eggplant Pamigiana.
For dishes where it will be cooked sliced, it's worth extracting its bitter juices, by salting the slices, letting them drain, then washing them and patting them dry before cooking.
If you need to fry the slices for a dish like Moussaka, they drink such a lot of oil that's then released into the dish, I think it's worth roasting them instead. I liberally oil a baking sheet, turn them in the oil both sides, then roast them till gold in a 375F oven.
I've seen them used in Vietnam cubed and brought to the boil then the water thrown out before carrying on with the recipe, another method of eliminating the bitterness.