One of the things I love about cooking is that it's unlimited. After nearly fifty years of cooking a beloved vegetable, to come across one new method for cooking it is a pleasure. But to find two such new methods in less than a year -- wowsa.

The first I owe to Amanda Hesser, who writes for the New York Times, and to Patricia Wells, author of many a cookbook, mostly on French food. In an omnibus review of cookbooks, Hesser mentioned that she had learned about steaming eggplants from Wells's Vegetable Harvest (Morrow, 2007), a book I already owned. (How could I resist when it carried the wonderful subtitle Vegetables at the Center of the Plate?) Sure enough, there it was on page 182, a recipe I had skipped over for Steamed Eggplant with Buttermilk-Thyme Dressing. (It's almost always worth while to read about books you have already bought.)

As far as I'm concerned, a fundamental rule of easy cooking states: That which can be steamed can equally well be nuked.

You probably know that you don't have to salt and drain eggplants any more to draw out bitterness -- it was bred out of them decades ago, leaving behind only the flowery sweetness that always lay beneath. Salting and draining still tighten the eggplant's texture, of course, and you may sometimes want that effect, but these days I usually want the more open, almost whipped-cream texture of the undrained flash. To me it makes a wonderful partner for the leathery texture of the skin -- I never peel eggplant.

If you want to salt and drain eggplant, all you have to do is slice it, salt it heavily with kosher salt, set it in a colander, and put a weight on it, like a can of tomatoes on a plate. 20-30 minutes later it will have drained as much as it's going to. Depending on what you're doing with it, you may want to rinse it and you may want to dry it. End of story on salting and draining.

I should mention, by the way, that sometimes when you cut into an eggplant you see a sort of bicolor effect, where part of the flesh is cream-colored and part is tea‑colored. I don't know what causes that pattern, but there's nothing harmful about it and both parts cook up the same and taste the same.

OK, so whether you've drained the eggplant or not, you put it in your microwave and, um, you know, you microwave it. Small amount of time for a small amount of eggplant on medium high, that sort of thing. The cooked flesh is beautiful, creamy, like eating a cloud. That's all there is to it.

The second new way of cooking I may have discovered myself, although who knows, I could have read about it a hundred times and forgotten. It's a bit more work.

Eggplant flesh, as you have undoubtedly noticed, is capable of absorbing up to twenty times its weight in oil, and while a small bite of oil-soaked eggplant is delightful, more than a small bite is gag-making. It's just too much. Here's one way to keep it from absorbing so much oil.

Cut the eggplant into quarters if it's slender, into wedges if it's fat. Put the wedges skin‑side down on a greased baking sheet and roast them at 425° for 15 minutes.

The roasting seals the flesh so that it no longer acts as an oil sponge.

Now whip the eggplant out of the oven and use a pastry brush to brush the flesh with oil.

Put the eggplant back in the oven for 3 minutes.

I've experimented with flavoring the oil you use to baste them before putting them back in the oven, and it's a waste. After they're done, however, you will definitely want to salt them, and you might want to brush them with some more oil, which could be a flavored oil if you like.

They're as good as candy.