July 9, 2012 Dinner – Eggplant with Garlic Sauce and Steamed Snow Peas

Suzette gave me a lovely cookbook for Christmas, “Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo.  We have come to love her recipe for Eggplant with Garlic Sauce on page 169.

Most of her recipes involve adding a delicately flavored sauce to cooked ingredients and this recipe is no exception.

Sauce:

1 Tbsp. dark Soy Sauce

2 tsp. Oyster Sauce

1 tsp. white rice vinegar

1/2 tsp. Shaoxing wine

½ tsp  pepper flakes from hot Chili oil

2 tsp. sugar

½ tsp. of cornstarch mixed with  2 tsp. Chicken Stock

¼ tsp. salt

Ingredients:

1 lb. of eggplants (if using large Western eggplant with thick skins, peeled) cut into ½ inch wide strips)

2 tsp. mince garlic

2 - 3 Tbsp. of peanut oil (the original recipe calls for 4 cups of peanut oil)

Our adjustments.  

We had 1 ½ lb. of small thin skinned Ichiban Japanese eggplants (Ta Lin - $1.49/lb.), so we left the skins on.  I chopped 2 Tbsp. of fresh garlic from our garden.  I reduced the amount of pepper flakes and I roughly estimated, rather than measured, the sauce ingredients as I mixed them in a bowl.  We had PPI roast chicken from the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery, so I sliced about 1 lb. of chicken. 

Preparation – (paraphrasing Lo) We do not like a lot of oil so Suzette stir fried the eggplant strips in about 2 - 3 Tbsp. of peanut oil until they softened and were cooked.  When they were cooked she removed the eggplant and drained the grease from them on a paper towel laid in a bowl.

When the eggplant was cooked we added enough oil to make 1 ½ Tbsp of oil in the wok and heated it and then added the garlic and cooked it for 35 seconds to release its fragrance.  Then we returned the eggplant and the chicken to the wok and stir fried it for another 1 ½ to 2 minutes until it was well mixed with the garlic.

Make a well in the center of the mixture, stir the sauce and pour it into the well.  Stir the mix well for about 2 minutes or until the sauce thickens.

The recipe calls for serving with steamed breads, but we made steamed basmati rice, instead.

This is currently one of our favorite Chinese dishes.  If you like eggplant and spicy flavors, you will love it.

I buy all the Oriental ingredients at Ta Lin.  It took a while to figure out the dark soy sauce, but I finally settled on Lee Kum Kee’s Premium Dark Soy Sauce, which a helpful oriental woman at Ta Lin said was the correct thickness of soy for the recipe.

The aspect of Lo’s recipes that I like the best is their delicate fragrance.  They seem to be more aromatic and taste lighter and cleaner than other Chinese recipes I have cooked in the past.   I highly recommend her “Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking” cookbook, although she has authored several other cookbooks, which I have not tried yet.

We steamed Snow peas and, when the eggplant had thickened we plated up the dishes with rice covered with the eggplant dish with a pile of steamed snow peas on the side and drank beer with the really delicate and delicious, yet spicy, dinner.

Bon Appétit