D had a plan to use up the extra rice I cooked when I made the rice and herb salad the other day. It was long grain brown rice, about half of the amount from 1 cup of uncooked rice. 
D wanted to put eggplant in it, and specifically a kind of eggplant that gets all creamy when cooked – something he remembers from Le Cheval in Oakland. He started by chopping 1/3 of a yellow onion (“less than 1/4 cup”) and cooking it in peanut oil. Then he cut a Japanese eggplant (kind of greenish, purplish, whitish in color – streaky) about 8″ long, into strips perhaps 1 1/2″ by 1/2″, and added it, cooking it for a long time in peanut oil. Finally, he added garlic, salt and pepper, Thai basil from the garden, and at the very end, ginger. This was delicious! The eggplant was especially good. D also cooked up the rest of the broccolini that I prepped a few days ago – the stems, mostly – and cooked this for 1 minute in boiling water, then added lemon and ginger bits. We thought the ginger didn’t meld well (needed more time) and it turns out the stems need more time to cook than the flowers, but it was still tasty.
D served another Grocery Outlet tester wine – another 2012 Ventoux, this time a rose, from the same winery, called “Les Chaberts.” The wine was 50% grenache, 40% syrah, and 10% cinsault, and 13.5% alcohol. We enjoyed it. It cost $3.99! Probably worth a trip back to GO for a few more bottles. We had an Acme Pain au Levain (started at lunch) which we bought at the Bowl at noon. Great bread.
We ate up the last two pluots from Woodleaf, which were terrific! We used these to toast my sister P on her birthday.
Lunch:
We had planned to have a salad with the leftover Navy beans, and D said he wanted a hard-boiled egg on the salad, too, so I set that up while he was on his way back from delivering groceries to our friend V. I used up this fabulously delicate lettuce – is it a butter 
lettuce? – from Blue Heron at the farmers’ market, and sprinkled drained beans and egg chunks over the lettuce. D was scheduled to make a vinaigrette when he got home, and decided lemon would be great with this instead of vinegar – indeed, it was. D wanted some crunch, so in the middle of lunch he got up and cut up some celery. It was an excellent addition, both for texture and for taste. We had the beginnings of the Acme Levain for lunch, and the last 1/3 bottle of El Chapparal, an old vines garnacha we opened much too long ago (29th!). It was considerably the worse for wear, I thought – oxidized quite a bit – though the enticing flavors were still detectable.
