Shimmy Shimmy Coconut

Three of my favourite things - chilli, garlic and eggplant-y goodness. A local vegetarian restaurant here in Canberra has this dish called ‘eggplant and mushroom in clay pot’ that my very omnivorous friend probably has steamy dreams about (if the noises he makes as he eats is anything to go by). The soft eggplant and chewy mushrooms, combined with an amazing spicy sauce is really quite close to perfect.

So a recent expedition to the farmer’s market led me to buy an eggplant and ponder what I could possibly make that was a little different from my standard (but spectacularly delicious) eggplant rollatini from Veganomicon. A short google of eggplant hotpot led me to this dish and with a little tweaking and a lack of hot bean paste resulted in:

Hot Garlic Eggplant

1 large eggplant, cut into strips and then bite sized pieces

1TBSP chopped ginger

1TBSP minced garlic

2TBSP Hot sauce (I used Sri Racha hot sauce)

2TBSP dark soy sauce

2 tsp white sugar

1 tsp salt, plus extra

1/2C stock

~1 handful of chopped green shallots

2TBSP corn flour + 4TBSP water

Saute eggplant in a little hot oil until golden, then add water and cook until eggplant is soft. Remove from pan.

Cook garlic and ginger in a little oil at low heat then add the hot sauce and cook for 30 seconds. Add the soy sauce, sugar and salt and cook for 2 minutes, continuously stirring until sauce forms. If sauce is too thin, add the premixed corn flour+water and stir until combined. Add the eggplant and cook for 5-10 minutes over medium heat. Add the shallots and take off the heat. Serve over rice.

I recently developed an interest in Australian food. Not the lamington, ANZAC cookie, TimTam, vegemite on everything kind of fare (although soooo very good in their own right). Rather, utilising native Australian herbs, spices and methods in cooking more interesting dishes. Truth be told, my research led me to mostly fish and meat based recipes (not that big a deal as most recipes can be adapted, as we are learning from Hezbollah tofu!). But as I was searching through Benjamin Christie’s website I came across this nice sounding recipe for a paperbark smoked vegetable parcel I didn’t have all the ingredients listed in the recipe (although, oddly I did have some paperbark I recently bought from the markets), but made do with potato, carrot and green capsicum all thinly sliced. I layered half the amount of the vegetables on to the paperbark then seasoned with salt, pepper and an Australian spice mix called yakajirri (bush tomato). I then repeated the layering and seasoning and rolled the parcel up and tied both ends with string.

It was so quick to cook - only 20mins at 200-220 degrees celcius. I didn’t have the tomato relish that was a garnish in the original recipe, but I topped the parcel with dry roasted roughly chopped macadamia nuts and a side of mashed potato:

It definitely had a smoky flavour to it, and the bush tomato spice mix was a really nice addition. I’m thinking tofu with a dry rub will be the next thing to be wrapped with the paper bark.

My poor unfortunate Toshiba satellite M60 had a fit and died two weeks ago, taking all of my work files and pictures with it! But thanks to the awesome IT team at work I was able to salvage my data. That said, it doesn’t look good for little bluey (my laptop) and I’ve been on blog strike until the shock wore off. But I’m back now…

I’ve blogged about these before and mentioned at the time that I was attempting to make them at home because they were so delicious. I recently stumbled upon a recipe on a blog (that I now can’t find a link for!) from Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of the Far East for scallion (spring onion) bread. The image looked similar to what we’d had previously at Dumpling Inn and the only ingredients needed were plain flour, cold water, hot water, shallots, sesame oil, vegetable oil and salt. Sounded easy enough! The most time consuming part is preparing the dough, so if you use this recipe be prepared to make the dough a few hours in advance and spend some time rolling the pastry and a sesame oil roux in a fashion not too dissimilar to making a croissant (ok, its not like it at all except for the rolling of a fat into dough, then repeating the process again). As soon as I can find that other blog, I’ll post the recipe, however the end results were good but not as great as the Dumpling Inn shallot cakes:

Next time I think I’d quickly fry the shallots with some garlic and salt before filling the dough and I would probably bake them instead of frying them as they were a little greasy.

My work place has quite a few catered functions, with the food usually supplied by the only cafe in the building. At such occasions, the only vegan fare is some of the alcohol and other beverages which is mostly fine by me. That said, sometimes a vegan can get hungry and it is really bad to see a wide array of non-vegan food and know that I’m getting nothing! One thing that has particularly hurt is watching people rave about the zucchini puffs. Vegetarians and meat-eaters alike make noises of pleasure whilst eating these little balls of fatty goodness and I have developed an ever-growing envy of them and their stupid puffs! Looking at numerous cheese and egg-rich recipes made me decide that it would probably not be too hard to veganise. As I had nothing to base the taste on, I was putting ingredients in a little blindly. I won’t put the recipe yet, as it didn’t turn out as nice as I would have hoped - they were quite bland and I shallow fried them so they were still not quite cooked in the middle. Once I perfect the taste I will post the recipe.

But here are a couple of pictures of this first attempt:

By the time I finished making these, I was in a hurry to get to a netball game so I scrapped my intention to make a lemon flavoured aioli and went with some tomato sauce instead.

I think the next attempt will involve baking them in the hopes they cook through and remain crunchy.