Food 13 Aug 2005 12:59 pm
Eggplant Nixon
At the farmers’ market today I ran across an eggplant that bears a striking resemblance to Richard Nixon:
My extra-lame snapshottery skills couldn’t do it justice, so I asked Josh to take some pictures of it.
Soon I will cook Eggplant Nixon and eat his brains. Yesssss. My plan is to make a version of makeua oop, a Burmese dish that involves frying a spice mixture, adding vegetables, and steaming it all without added water. The original recipe uses dried shrimp, which will never be in my home again — oh, man, the smell, ugh, yuk, no. It also uses ground pork, but I’m happy with turkey here. No meat at all is also a good option, and probably better than using fake meat in this dish.
Eggplant Oop
(adapted from Hot Sour Salty Sweet)3 Thai bird chiles or a roughly equivalent number of other hot dried red peppers — I use at least 5 homegrown cayennes.
1 large shallot
5 cloves garlic
a tomato
1/4 cup ground turkey (optional)
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 1/2 pounds of eggplant
salt
vegetable oilSoak the peppers in warm water for about fifteen minutes. Mince the shallot and garlic, chop the tomato roughly, and slice the eggplant into 1/4″ slices.
Chop the softened peppers. Put the shallot, garlic, and peppers in a blender (or mortar) with a little salt and blend to a paste; you’ll probably need to add a little soaking water. Add the tomato and process again.
Put a large pot with a tight-fitting lid over high heat and bring a little oil to a shimmer in it. If you’re using ground turkey, brown it now. Add the spice paste and turmeric and cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes. Then turn the heat to medium and add the eggplant. Stir it up, then cover tightly.
Cook this, stirring about once every five or ten minutes, for forty-five minutes to an hour or until the eggplant has collapsed into a shapeless mass.
Serve warm or room temperature.
The authors of Hot Sour Salty Sweet suggest that this is very good — if very nontraditional — as a spread on bread. They’re right.
on 13 Aug 2005 at 3:31 pm 1.sphinx_n_herhat said …
Soon I will cook Eggplant Nixon and eat his brains.
One of the other folks on my friends list has a quote book of odd things that get said at her house, which are, of course, even stranger out of context. This would be a good candidate for your book, were you to have one.
on 13 Aug 2005 at 4:27 pm 2.Cam Sculpin said …
Heh. I think we could fill that book pretty quickly. The other day, searching for the phrase “pneumatic tube”, all I came up with for a while was, “You know! That thing you don’t put rats in!”
“Cake?” said Josh. “Hair?”
“No! At the bank! Goes zip!”
“Uh…”
“Pneumatic tube!”
I cannot be the only person in the world whose first association with pneumatic tubes is about startled rodents taking trips in them - can I? Well, maybe I can be.
on 13 Aug 2005 at 4:30 pm 3.Cam Sculpin said …
Which reminds me:
on 15 Aug 2005 at 12:52 am 4.Lisa said …
Ohh, very phallic…
I think you may have to mark that photo as “may offend”
on 15 Aug 2005 at 12:58 am 5.Cam Sculpin said …
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
on 17 Sep 2005 at 12:43 am 6.Sculpin » local food: baked apples with honey and hazelnuts said …
s and oils that don’t grow here, but probably not if the dish is built around them. (Eggplant oop, for instance, really requires that turmeric, imho.) More cheating: I re [...]
on 08 Jun 2006 at 10:19 am 7.Sculpin » Cauliflower Dum said …
[...] It’d probably be pretty easy to adapt this to a less caloric model by roasting instead of frying the cauliflower and using less fat in the spice paste. (Mizducky, you’re the cauliflower queen — comments?) And I think you could finish it in a solar oven. The general method is a lot like that of Eggplant Oop. A heavy enameled cast-iron pot is perfect for this. Cauliflower Dum [...]
on 07 Sep 2006 at 5:42 pm 8.Sculpin » local food: solar oop said …
[...] Holy… Okay, see, when I wrote that Eggplant Oop recipe? I guess I’d been eating a lot of hot peppers right around then. I just made a batch for dinner, and let me tell you, five cayenne peppers is a lot. A lot. Yeeeoowwww. [...]