veg love

One of my favorite vegetables now adorns my kitchen:

 

My apologies, Grandma, for the less than stellar picture of your painting. My late grandmother was an art lover and a painter herself. Her house just sold and we’ve been cleaning it out. Depressing, sad, and weird, but at the same time we’ve gotten some awesome art, and this particular piece is now livening up our kitchen! SHE PAINTED THAT.

Anyway, there was more eggplant in our kitchen, but of the edible kind. So I made last night’s dinner with this:

We had a filling shortage for the roasted vegetables, so my mom kept aside three lil baby eggplants that had already been cooked (in, uh, COPIOUS quantities of olive oil) and I used ‘em to make one of my favorite eggplant dishes: curry!

I started with half an onion and about a tsp of fresh ginger, minced. I sauteed them in olive oil (probably about a tsp of that) on medium/medium low heat.

Then I added the chopped eggplants, half a huuuuuge tomato, and a teaspoon each of garam masala and curry powder. I threw in half a cup of water, brought to a boil, and covered and reduced heat and simmered for 20 minutes or so.

Here was the final product (I apologize for it being so dark):

To accompany, what but basmati rice?! Basmati rocks my world. We have brown basmati, but honestly white basmati is way more delicious, pluuuuuuus we had all gotten home from work and were tired and hungry.

Fresh ‘loupe. Mmmmmm. I was actually chopping up a cantaloupe that needed urgent attention before it went bad, and some of the chunks didn’t fit in the tupperware. Happy accident, because the flavor was fabbity fab with the curry.

  

My nice, colorful dinner plate of rice, curry, cantaloupe, and leftover fennel salad from last night.

Curry closeup:

It was aight. It was plenty velvety (that would be thanks to the tons upon tons of olive oil) but the flavor was a little… flat? It needed acid or more ginger or something. But a great, quick Monday dinner, so I can’t complain.

I ate more than pictured- first of all, I was huuungry, not having had a snack at work. Moreover I am in the unprecedented situation of feeling that I could stand to gain a few pounds (due to also getting from my grandma’s house a working scale, rather than our old one that we broke weighing suitcases to go on an airplane and was what we thought was 20 pounds off but was in fact… er… 14). Anyway, eating more calories than I burn- on purpose- is a HEADY thought!