Carefree Cooking

Spicy Garlic Eggplant

I made this last Monday but due to some technical difficulties, I was not able to write an entry about it. This dish is really easy to prepare. There are three major ingredients required: Eggplant, ground pork, and spicy garlic eggplant sauce (Lee Kum Kee). I used some other garnishes like parsley and peanuts but these are totally optional. In fact, my wife and my sister hated it. But I thought the dish will look bland if I didn't add any color or texture.

There are multiple ways of cooking eggplant. When you go to a chinese restaurant and order the eggplant hotpot, it's usually very oily. The reason is they deep fry the eggplant. The bad thing about this is that eggplant acts like a sponge and absorbs all the oil. So if you are thinking of doing this, make sure you use good oil. Chinese recipes would normally ask for peanut oil for its flavour, but this type of oil is also the most unhealthy oil you can use. I usually use canola oil or olive oil.

Before I made this dish, I did a little bit of research on the internet on how to cook eggplant. I've already talked about deep frying. There are other ways of preparing it such as pan frying, grilling, and baking. I didn't have the required 1 hr to bake the eggplants and I didn't think grilling would be that much quicker as well. So I opted for the pan frying. But instead of putting some oil, I used a non-stick pan and sprayed a little PAM just in case the eggplant decides to stick. I also read from a website that it's important to cook the eggplant thoroughly. Having a half cooked eggplant will not taste good. Since I'm pan frying without oil, I have to cut the eggplant in small pieces. Ideally I would cut the eggplant in strips, but I didn't have the appropriate knife skills to do that.

After cooking the eggplant (you can always taste it if it's cook), I set them aside and started cooking the ground pork. Cooking the ground pork is very easy and quick as long as you break them apart to form little pieces. Once the ground pork is done, throw in the cooked eggplant and add the Lee Kum Kee sauce. I added some parsley and some chopped peanuts (for texture). Cooked them a little more until you are happy that the sauce is thoroughly mixed into the eggplant and ground pork. As a final touch, I put some left over parsley at the middle of the dish and sprinkled some more chopped peanuts around the dish.

There are many different types of eggplant and some are more bitter than others. Many recipe ask you to put some salt on the eggplant so that all the bitterness will be extracted. It's up to you to decide whether you want to sal the eggplant or not. You can try it without salting and if the eggplant taste too bitter for your taste, you can do the salt technique. It's not really an exact science after all, it's just carefree cooking :) Let me know what you think.

posted by carefreecooking @ 10:24 PM