Home alone cooking: aubergine mushroom stirfry

Posted on June 27, 2017 by lindaharley

This is a recipe from Gok’s Wok, a mix of Asian and fusion sorta healthy dishes.  The recipe calls for shitake mushrooms (I had a handful of chestnut ones needing used up) and also said it served 4. (ahahahahahha!)

I do love aubergines. They have such beautiful laquer black skins, and cook to such silky unctiousness (sorry, I appear to have turned into Nigella….)

Anyhoo.  I had most of the ingredients for this in my store cupboard, with a few substitutions, so off I went!

Chop the aubergine into cubes.  Cook in a wok with a splash of oil.  I like to add a lid so that it steams a bit, and reduces the acrid smell and smoke-alarm-setting-off factor.

I added a swish of sesame oil as they were almost done for added flavour.

Remove the aubergines, and add a chopped onion to the wok (half an onion for me).  Add some chopped mushrooms.  And 4 chopped anchovies.  For vegetarians, you could leave these out.  For veganishes who eat a bit of fish for environmental and health reasons, woohoo! And a chopped chilli (I used a spoonful from my jar of chopped chillies – it’s easier to control the heat with this method).

At this stage, the recipe wanted me to add a ton of straight to wok noodles.  I like the rice vermicelli ones, so I’d softened one nest of those, and added it.

The resulting panful was a substantial dinner, with leftovers for lunch.  I’m not convinced this would feed 4, as suggested in the recipe book (and who doesn’t have pictures of their dishes anyway…..)

 

Visually, it’s a bit brown, but it was darn tasty and I’ll be doing variations of this again.

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Home Alone Cooking Day 8: Roasted Aubergine

Posted on June 14, 2016 by lindaharley

This was a way of using up the aubergine and remainder of the can of black beans from earlier in the week.

bean rice 001

There was nothing complicated in the prep, but it did take a bit of time.

First stage was to oven bake some thin aubergine slices.  Recipe says “thin slices, a couple of millimeters” and the picture seems to suggest lengthwise cuts. And I could have used a mandolin. But I quite enjoyed the meditation like state produced by slicing my rounds by hand, taking my time.

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These (there were a lot of them) were put on an olive oil slicked tray, with more oil drizzled on top (how to do this? I don’t know! Should I have spritzed?  I felt some slices got lots more oil than others)

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The recipe called for sauteed spinach with garlic.  I had no spinach, but I did have pak choi.

The recipe also called for brown rice cooked from scratch for 40 mins.  I had none of that either, but I did have a ready cook rice sachet or brown basmati and quinoa.

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In the recipe, the final stage was to dry roast off “a good handful” of pumpkin and sunflower seeds.  I did this stage first, before adding any of the softer ingredients, and also to stop the rest getting cold while i did my dry roasting.

bean rice 005

 

So, to assembly – rice stuff stirred with tahini and tamari.  Pak choi and bean garlic stir fry. Sort of roasted aubergine slices. And a sprinkle of roasted seeds.

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Honestly? It felt a bit knit-your-own-lentil worthy and heavy. I love aubergine, but I’m not sure this used them to their best advantage.

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