Thursday, August 6, 2009

My recipe (Yelp style) for Miso-marinated Eggplant

Enough people wanted this recipe, so here it is.

Miso-soaked eggplant over rice

Anyway, you need (for 1 big eater and 1 small eater):
-1 medium/large eggplant
-enough white miso to coat chopped up eggplant (~3/4 cup or so, the more the saltier)
-sugar (enough to do a good coat of the eggplant twice, so like maybe 4-5 tablespoons?)
-sake (about 1/2 cup)
-soy sauce (see instructions)
-3 large cloves garlic
-1 large onion
-1 package tofu
-1-2 green onions (not necessary, but I like it for the slightly different flavor than the onions, plus it gives it some color)
-some cooking oil
-rice

Directions:
So you COULD do the whole pressing-the-eggplant-between-paper-towel etc. to get the bitterness out. I say "fuck it." Just chop that bad boy up into about ~1/2" squares.

Throw eggplant into bowl/tray/container. Dump the miso onto the eggplant, then pour just enough soy sauce to sort of lube up the miso so that it spreads easier. Toss the eggplant, then add the sake to further dilute the miso. You're basically making a sake/soy sauce/miso soup, but you don't want it too liquidy. The consistency of melted ice cream should be good. Sprinkle enough sugar to coat the entire surface area of the top layer of eggplant. Mix, then cover and let sit.

Wash/soak your rice, put it in the rice cooker. Don't worry about the eggplant.

Start cutting your onions/garlic. Dice the garlic, chop up the onions however you like. I do the green onions sorta big so they stand out a bit (but I really like green onions).

When your veggies are chopped, stir the eggplant up. At this point I'd probably do another sprinkling of sugar over the eggplant. I just thought that maybe brown sugar might be good?

Anyhoo, I went and worked on my website for a while, so I'd just let everything sit for another 15 minutes or so. Alternatively, you could probably do the 15 minutes first, then chop the veggies if it weirds you out to have chopped onions and garlic sitting on your cutting board.

So I came back, washed my hands, and popped a frying pan on the stove. I set it up for medium-high heat. Oil goes into pan, along with garlic and onions. When they start to get a little cooked, stir up that eggplant mix and dump it in the pan. Proceed to stir. I got lazy, so after the eggplant was partially cooked, I added the green onions and tofu in, mixed it up a bit, covered it and turned it down to medium-low heat and ate some cookies.

Bam. 5 or so minutes went by and I went back and taste-tested the dealy. It seemed almost done (you don't want to overcook the eggplant too much, otherwise it gets really mush-like, which is cool if you're into mush like I am, but for others, maybe not so much) so I turned off the heat and while I set up the streaming TV show to watch with dinner, I let the eggplant cook a bit more. Serve it over rice, but be warned, this sucker is salty as fuck. I mean, miso + soy sauce? Get some water, pronto.

Anyway, I hope this inane recipe works for you, and I apologize if it doesn't. I really need to start measuring shit out.

No comments: