Some clarifications

Questions I got tell me they are necessary:
Eggplant I cooked for the multicultural shares - called "Vinete" in Romanian - are the common summer apetiser there and completely unknown here. People go crazy when they taste it (and I couldn't make them without the trusty wooden chopper Cati gave me - a tool non-existant here).

"Could be worse" - the book Maya read is the story of a grandpa who was reacting this way to anything his grandchildren would say. When he heard then saying that "nothing interesting ever happened to him" he makes up a cock and bull story to impress them (It has the abominable snow man, giant goldfish and a monster named Something-or-Other).
It was a useful book to teach Maya about truth and fiction (lies) since they read at school "The true Story of the 3 Pigs by A. Wolf". They stayed on it for a week, discussing and building houses but the teachers left out the main theme: this was the self-serving version of the wolf in which he is good, the pigs are guilty and black is white. Maya was convinced that this was the truth ("it says so in the title") and only "Could be Worse" helped me shake this belief. We talked about reasons people make up stories.
Since these days our entire media is in the hands of wolves berating pigs, lambs and the Little Red Riding Hood standing in their way, I thought it an important lesson to learn.