which_chick | (no subject)

Somewhere I heard tell of folks who ate "surprise dinner" where they'd open a can of food without a lable on it and surprise!, whatever was inside, that was dinner. I think, perhaps, that I'm a little higher on the socioeconomic scale than the people who bought cans-without-lables at a discount. However, that doesn't mean that there are no surprise! dinners at my house.

(You can take the like to pretend they're middle class either way, incidentally. Nobody is middle-class, but since this is America, we like to pretend that we all are.)

At my house, the surprise! dinner is one where I turn to the sprawling whore of information and look for a recipe I haven't tried before. Today's effort was a surprisingly tasty sweet-n-sour eggplant thing from India.

Start with a big frying pan and medium heat. Put in 1/4 cup unsalted butter, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Heat until melty. Add 2 1/2 teaspoons garam masala, 2 teaspoons ground coriander, 1 teaspoon ground turmeric, heat until it smells nice (about a minute). Add a really big eggplant (or two small ones) cut into cubes. Toss to coat and cook a couple of minutes. (The eggplant will slurp up the butter in an alarmingly short period of time.) Add 1 1/2 cups water, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar. Stir, cook with a lid on top for ten minutes or until cubes are all tender. Remove the lid, continue to cook down until the sauce is nearly gone and the eggplant pieces are slightly charred on the bottom.

Serve (over rice, if you eat rice) and put chopped fresh cilantro on top.

I had mine with a side of plain yogurt instead of rice. It was tasty in a can't-stop-eating-it way. I'm not accustomed to having sweet as a dominant note (like, more than you get in cooked cabbage and cooked carrots and cooked onions -- and if those things are not sweet to you, I can't help that. They are sweet to me.) in main dish food items, so this was a little weird for me. The spices were fine, blended well, really, but I think if I make it again, there isn't going to be any sugar in it. There might be some red pepper, though. That'd go over a treat, I think. (Authentic is for other people, anyway.)