January 19, 2013 Eggplant in Garlic sauce and Stir fried Chinese Mustard Greens with onions and a Sesame dressing

January 19, 2013 Eggplant in Garlic sauce and Stir fried Chinese Mustard Greens with onions and a  Sesame dressing

Last Sunday with Suzette I had bought sesame seeds at Ta Lin and looked at their suribachis (Japanese grinding bowls) but Ta Lin had only one small one for $7.99 that had irregular grooves that would have defeated one’s effort to grind seeds.  We had not frozen the PPI BBQ pork, so I decided to go buy a large Chinese eggplant at Ta Lin on Friday and I knew that Suzette would like to use up the BBQ Pork by making another great dish of Eggplant in garlic sauce if we had a good eggplant. 

One Saturday Suzette made me get dressed and drive her to an address near San Mateo and Central where it was advertised on Craig’s list there was a free planter, but when we arrived it was gone.   Suzette said we were close to Restore It and so we drove there and then since I needed gas for the Land Cruiser, we drove up San Mateo and as we neared Montgomery, she said, “Why don’t we go to Goodwill.”  I have become fond of shopping for luxury shirts at Goodwill because they are under $5.00 each, so we went to Goodwill and I shopped with Suzette.  We found no monkey pod wood items but she found a lovely covered plastic cake stand and 24 small glass candle holders for outside illumination in the summer and I found a small suribachi exactly like the one I wanted for $.99 and two shirts that I liked for $4.74 each less the 10% (ten percent) discount that Suzette had from her last shopping trip to Goodwill.

So when we arrived home after filling the Cruiser up with gas at Costco for $2.69/gallon I suggested we cook the eggplant and we agreed to freeze the PPI Salmon because we had agreed to cook dinner at Debbie and Jeff’s on Sunday night.  I cut up the large eggplant and minced 1 Tbsp. of garlic from our garden.

I wanted to cook the remaining Chinese Mustard Greens I had bought at Ta Lin last Sunday with some spinach I had bought at Costco on Thursday and remembered a Japanese sesame seed dressing made with a suribachi, so while Suzette cooked the Eggplant in Garlic Sauce using the last 1 ½ pounds of PPI BBQ pork, I cooked basmati rice with a little instant dashi and broken up stems of dried Senche seaweed thirty minutes on low heat and prepared the str fried vegetables.

Suzette again used the Eggplant and Garlic Sauce recipe (page 169) in the new Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking Cookbook she had bought me for Christmas last year.  The author, Eileen Yin Fei Lo, cooks with a style that adds fragrance to the food by adding small amounts of rice cooking wine to many recipes, rather than overpowering them with flavorings. 

Eggplant with Garlic Sauce.

You first make the Sauce (This is the recipe from the book but we doubled this recipe because we had two pounds of eggplant and some other ingredients we were adding to the dish.)

1 Tbsp. double dark soy sauce

2 tsp. Oyster Sauce

1 tsp. white rice wine vinegar

½ tsp. Shaoxing cooking wine

½ tsp. pepper flakes from hot oil (we reduce this to avoid making the dish too spicy)

½ tsp. of cornstarch dissolved in 2 Tbsp. of chicken stock

 I sliced the large Chinese Eggplant into three inch by ½ inch strips (about two pounds) and Suzette str fried them in three or four small batches in several Tbsps. of heated peanut oil.  The recipe calls for deep frying all the eggplant strips in 4 cups of peanut oil, but we never use that much oil).

After Suzette had cooked the eggplant, she stir fried the garlic and then added the BBQ pork.  Then she returned the eggplants to the wok and stir fried it with the vegetable and meat mixture for a minute and then made a well in the middle of the ingredients and added the sauce and cooked the eggplant mixture for a minute or two while I was stir frying the vegetable dish.

I had sliced 1 medium onion in anticipation of putting it into the eggplant dish but Suzette said she wanted to keep the Eggplant dish simple, so I decided to use the onion in my vegetable dish.  I chopped and rinsed off three cups of mustard greens and ½ cup of spinach and minced 5 or 6 cloves of garlic and about 1 ½ Tbsp. of ginger and sliced thinly four shitake mushrooms.  I heated about two Tbsp. of peanut oil in the large wok and added the onion, garlic and ginger and stir fried that for about ten minutes until the onions softened and took on color.  When Suzette had finished stir frying the eggplant strips, we fried about ¼ cup of sesame seeds in the remaining hot peanut oil in her wok until they turned golden brown.  I then put the sesame seeds into the suribachi and ground them with a wooden pestle until they were crushed a bit.  I then added a little soy sauce and ground them some more until they were a rough paste.  After the onion strips were soft and had taken on some color, I added the chopped greens and the mushrooms and stir fried them together and added a dash of rice Shaoxing cooking wine and soy and sesame oil and covered the wok to let the vegetables steam, while Suzette added the sauce to the eggplant dish and Willy went to the cellar for beers.

After a few minutes I stirred the vegetables and they had softened and so I added the sesame dressing to the vegetables and gave them one more stir and we were ready to eat the vegetables,  Suzette's eggplant dish and the warm rice with some cold beers.

I loved the dinner and the Suzette agreed that the addition of the sesame dressing was a nice touch.  I am now reading my Japanese Cooking  A Simple Art cookbook at page 253 and seeing that the Japanese method of making the dish calls for parboiling the spinach and then put it into the suribachi and pushing it into the sauce with the pestle.   I can hardly wait until next time to make the dish in the accurate Japanese manner.  I bet the Spinach will pick up the sesame dressing from the suribachi’s grooves, which I did not do tonight.

We watched Friday evening’s broadcast of the Bill Maher show on Willy’s computer and ate dinner.  Willy then found and played the second episode of the third season of Downtown Abbey for us on his computer, which we had missed last week because we went to see Tom Paxton.  

After dinner I ate some fruit cake with tea.

I see the almost imperceptible train of thoughts and actions that clearly led to this evening’s meal.  From the PPI BBQ pork ribs from our Cotton Bowl dinner with Susan and Charlie Palmer, to the need to replenish our larder with sesame seeds and looking at the suribachis at Ta Lin, to the purchase of a bag of spinach to have another green vegetable on Thursday at Costco, to buying the large eggplant on Friday at Ta lin and a fresh bottle of peanut oil, to finding the suribachi at Goodwill on Saturday, it seems I have been subliminally working toward a manifestation of my desire to make the spinach with sesame dressing dish of thirty years ago.  Some of my food déjà vu thoughts amaze me.  For example, I had remembered, without looking at a cook book, that the Japanese recipe called for adding soy sauce to the sesame seeds in the suribachi to emulsify them.   

What a great meal, combining a line of PPI ingredients and a remembrance of a dish I had not made in 30 years from seeing the sesame seeds and suribachi.

Bon Appètit