Whether shopping in your own garden or your neighbor’s, or at a farmers’ market, look for small vegetables for this. You want baby eggplant, either long Asian-style or smaller Italian globes, picked when the skin is still shiny and the interior seeds are still small. Skinny Italian frying peppers. Sweet garden onions with the green tops still attached. Thin-skinned cherry tomatoes and zucchini picked well before they explode. I’d avoid those tiny, bland “baby zucchini”; in my experience, zucchini doesn’t develop any personality until adolescence.
Char siu, the strips of barbecued roast pork with their signature crimson exterior, is a treasured Cantonese meat, and the most popular siu mei dish. Siu mei is a term that refers to the roasted meats popular in Hong Kong, but also commonly found in Chinatown windows around the world. Most city-dwelling Cantonese kids grew up eating siu mei—during my carnivorous youth, as my mother arrived home from the store, I would sidle up with my best good-daughter-face and charm a few slices of warm, juicy char siu and crispy pork crackling before dinnertime. In this recipe, eggplant is marinated, char siu style, in a fragrant, fruity barbecue sauce. Eggplant, a renowned carrier of flavor, greedily absorbs the sauce before it is roasted at high heat, emerging sweet and silky, imbued with lots of dark, caramelized notes. A note for gluten intolerant cooks: make sure your hoisin sauce is gluten-free or use the homemade version on page 151. This marinade is incredibly versatile and can be used to marinate and roast firm tofu and other vegetables in the exact same way. This is best eaten with rice, of course, but it’s also good stuffed into a crusty roll with cilantro, mint and salad greens, or used to make eggplant char siu bao (there’s a bao recipe in To Asia, With Love).
This is one of the most popular recipes of all time on my blog. Normally, a restaurant chef would deep-fry the eggplant and then cook it with the sauce in a large wok over extremely high heat to keep it glossy and crispy. To avoid all that hassle, I’m sharing my favorite method for preparing eggplant without deep-frying while still making it crispy. The eggplant is then finished in a savory, sticky sauce—just enough to coat the eggplant so that it won’t turn soggy.
This frittata is a take on both the Persian kuku sabzi (herb frittata) andkuku bademjan (eggplantfrittata). Once the eggplant is burnt, it really is just a matter of making the egg batter and sticking the whole thing in the oven, leaving you to prepare a few other bits (if you like) for a quick and easy show stopper of a brunch.
Bondage. Leather. Eggplant. Those were the notes I made for myself about this recipe. Not exactly cryptic. When you grill eggplant, it looks like it’s wrapped in a leathery, tight casing. There’s something kinky about it. Or is it just me? You’ll notice that I am going to ask you to get up close and personal with your eggplant by making slits into its flesh. That’s not only for a cool patterned effect. Eggplant is like a sponge and you want the flesh exposed so that the hot, sticky, vinegary glaze can sneak into all the spots and make the eggplant glisten under the spotlights.
Some things are classic for a reason. Eggplant parm is the ultimate freezer food because it somehow holds up more perfectly than almost anything else no matter how much you deviate from the recipe or how long you leave it in the freezer. This might not look like the Italian American version you know, due to its lack of breading, but this is a take on what they serve in southern Italy. This dish is easier and healthier – with no frying involved - but keep in mind that the ingredients here truly matter. Buy a high-quality mozzarella and marinara sauce, and try to shy away from the huge eggplants because their seeds will add a lot of bitterness. You can slice them and salt them for a few hours, but I find that that’s a step too far when medium-sized eggplants are just as readily available. The main thing to keep in mind is that this dish is meant to be easy.
Slice each eggplant lengthwise into five or six long steaks. Sprinkle with sea salt and allow to stand for up to an hour or so while you make the creamed feta.