English mustard-spiked eggplant salsa and rare porterhouse steak.

Eggplant - known in England and other parts as the more evocative aubergine - is an underused vegetable, unless you are Lebanese or Turkish and then you probably have it coming out your ears.

No wonder: eggplant is a marvellous vegetable/fruit/berry (used as a vegetable, looks like a fruit, is botanically a berry). This distant relative of the tomato, chilli pepper, potato and tobacco (eat twenty eggplants for breakfast and forgo your morning cigarette) has a chameleonic ability to adapt to other flavours and ingredients, absorbing their flavours and goodness.

It was a late night. I had been to a committee meeting; long, but not as long as they used to be. The new president/chairman had taken over and had made good on his vow - and my insistent proposal - to cut meeting times to ninety minutes, if not seventy-five. For years they had on occasion blown out to midnight, from an eight p.m. start. They had been occasions for crusted-on committee hogs to have proxy social lives, monthly play-dates for lost souls, forums for the disaffected to voice their obsessions and roll their agendas over from month to month like Sisyphean rocks.

So on this occasion I was home by ten instead of the small hours of tomorrow. I looked in the fridge. There was an eggplant (it had been a hot day; normally they are stored at room temperature), a steak that had either to be grilled now or frozen, and a few other random vegetables. And there was a jar of Master Foods English mustard, its red lid a visual siren signalling to me from its position in the upper rack of the fridge door. But I like mustard anyway, and any way, for that matter.

I cut the eggplant into slices and fried them in olive oil both sides until grilled and softening. You don't need to salt them these days; the current varieties have the bitterness bred out of them, unlike some people. But most recipes still call for the laborious and time-consuming salting process: it's hard for some to change. Food preparation has an element of religious rite about it.

I grilled the steak, quickly, as I like it rare if not blue. It was a fine piece of porterhouse with that fine-grained, easily sliced texture that porterhouse tends to lose the more it is grilled, read tortured. There was once a restaurateur in Melbourne - Enri - who refused to overcook his steaks. If you liked well-done steak you didn't dine at Enri's Argentinian restaurant.

While the steak was grilling (I had about thirty seconds) I mashed the eggplant and folded through a tablespoon of the English mustard until it was hot and unctuous and redolent of smoke (not tobacco this time). Spooned over the top of the rare porterhouse, it made a perfect salsa. Not completely original, of course; there is the Indian eggplant kasundi, while the Japanese do a pickled eggplant tsukemono combination with English mustard.