Eggplant salad

We can buy Mexican eggplants for about 99 cents right now.  Our favorite meal by far is eggplant Parmesan, but it's a pretty big chore for the cook with all the breading, frying, grating and then making the pasta with red sauce that has to go with it in this house.   So sometimes I'll just dice the eggplant and saute it with peppers and onion along with a can of tomatoes and Italian seasoning.  That makes a good side dish. But you start to run out of ideas on what to do with an eggplant.

The Costco magazine had a recipe for a "Moroccan Eggplant Salad" that was interesting.  The eggplant cubes are mixed with egg white before you fry, which seemed to help them brown instead of getting soggy. Eggplant soaks up oil like a sponge and the recipe called for 1/2 cup oil, which is quite a bit, but the pieces are drained on paper towel and no additional oil is added for the dressing. You can tinker with the seasoning, but the ingredient list goes like this:

1 eggplant, cut into cubes
Salt
1 egg white
1/2 cup olive or grapeseed oil
1/2 cup roasted red peppers from the jar (chopped)
1/2 cup chopped green olives
1/2 tsp. cumin
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 smashed garlic clove
Fresh parsley, chopped

Sprinkle the eggplant with salt and then mix in a bowl with the beaten egg white.  Fry in hot oil until brown and tender, then drain the pieces on paper towel.

Mix the fried eggplant with the remaining ingredients...

And it will look like a specialty salad from a fancy deli or restaurant.
The next day with leftovers I made myself a delicious lunch with one of those mostly worthless "sandwich thins."  Toasted, with a dab of hummus on top.