Parmesan Eggplant Fries

Yep. You can. Or you can peel it. Here are the pros and cons. Pros: the skin, like many other vegetable skins, is rich in vitamins. So leaving the skin on your eggplant offers some added health benefits. It also looks pretty! Cons: eggplant skin can be a little rubbery and thick making it difficult to bite through without some effort. This gets in the way of the silky smooth texture inside the eggplant. Ideally, you'll want to work with a fresh, young (small) eggplant with skin that isn't super thick and tough. A very large eggplant will likely have tough skin.

An easy way to tell if an eggplant is ripe and ready to eat is if its skin has a gloss to it. If it looks shiny, that's a good sign! Another way to tell is by feeling it. Does it feel somewhat soft when you squeeze it? That's good! Too firm and it's not yet ripe.

You can use a vegetable peeler but it can be tricky. So you may have better lucky using a sharp knife, and carefully removing the skin in shallow strips.

Say what? This is a weird little quirk that might not really make a big difference, but some say female eggplants contain more seeds and therefore have a more bitter taste and obviously a more seedy texture.

Look at the bottom of the eggplant, on the opposite end as the stem, and if you see a circular shape, it's male. If you see more of an elongated slit or rectangular shape, it's female.

Yes, you can. You do not need to de-seed an eggplant. The seeds are very small. The seeds do have a bitter taste but this is lessened when cooked. If the bitter taste bothers you, select a male eggplant with less seeds. It's not impossible, but since the seeds are so small and are embedded into the "meat" of the eggplant, it would be very difficult to remove them.