On our very last journey to H-Mart, Brian succumbed, as traditional, to the siren song of cheap eggplant. (The thin Chinese eggplants are often on sale for a lot less than a dollar a pound, and Brian just cannot resist them.) His proper plan modified into to make it into bangan bartha, a part of our general recipe rotation. However, as soon as I stated that we still wanted a Recipe of the Month for December (and did now not have lots time to make it, due to the truth we might be spending Christmas week with the in-criminal guidelines in Indiana), he decided to hunt round for a modern-day eggplant recipe alternatively. He come across this Oven-Roasted Eggplant and Butternut Squash Curry recipe on Food.Com, and for the reason that we already had a full twelve months's harvest of butternut squash stored away, he idea it gave the impression of a really perfect desire. The handiest element it referred to as for that we did not have were scallions (which he didn't expect it virtually needed, since it incorporates onion already) and smooth cilantro (which I don't deal with besides, so he had no trouble leaving it out).
However, there was one other snag: the recipe as written was somewhat complicated. It calls for you to wrap the whole eggplant and squash individually in aluminum foil, roast them for an hour and a half, let them cool, peel them, and mash them. Then you have to mix the mashed veggies with the masala (onion, tomato, and spice) mixture, which you've prepared while they were in the oven, and let the whole thing cook for another ten minutes. And when it's all done, you're supposed to serve it with chappatis, which are not exactly trivial to prepare.
All this rigmarole regarded as an alternative unnecessary to Brian, because he knew that it turn out to be flawlessly viable?And a whole lot faster?To roast eggplant by way of manner of cutting it into cubes. That's what he normally does whilst making bartha, and it comes out clearly first-class. So he created a simplified version of the recipe with the eggplant and squash cooked this way and truely mixed into the masala. He also progressed at the masala itself by way of using entire fenugreek seeds, sauteed together with the cumin seeds, in place of floor fenugreek. And wherein the recipe called for sparkling tomatoes, Brian used a aggregate of clean and canned?The last little tomatoes from our 2019 harvest, and sufficient canned diced tomatoes to make up a cup of quantity.
Here's Brian's modified model of the recipe:
Cut into 1/2-inch cubes, coat with 1 Tbsp olive oil, and roast 45 minutes at 450 ranges F:
20 oz.. Butternut squash
10 ozeggplant
Prepare masala:
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 tsp cumin seeds
20 fenugreek seeds
1 onion, finely chopped
1 c diced tomato
half of tsp floor coriander
1/four tsp turmeric
three/four tsp salt
Heat the oil on medium-high. Saute the cumin and fenugreek seeds until they become aromatic (about 30 seconds). Add onion and saute for 5 minutes or until soft. Add tomatoes and saute for another 5 minutes. Add coriander, turmeric, and salt and remove from heat.
When the squash and eggplant are finished, integrate with masala and serve over rice.
This dish smelled great as it was cooking, with all those fragrant spices popping in the oil and mingling with the smells of pungent onion and tart tomato. When it was finally done and the veggies were mixed in with the masala, it didn't exactly look as great as it smelled, but the taste delivered everything that the aroma had promised. It was warm and spicy, packed with flavor without tasting too overpoweringly of any one ingredient, and the tender texture of the baked eggplant and squash didn't seem to have lost anything from Brian's simplified cooking method. Likewise, the mixture of fresh and canned tomatoes didn't hurt the flavor any, and was probably preferable to supplementing our last two garden tomatoes with one of the pale and mushy "fresh" tomatoes many supermarkets carry in the wintertime. In fact, we're planning to try it again tomorrow, this time with only canned tomatoes, and my guess is the flavor won't suffer at all as a result.Even with Brian's simplified method, this recipe isn't splendid speedy to make; counting slicing time, it possibly takes an first rate hour from start to complete. But it's far quite smooth and pretty reasonably-priced, particularly if you have all of the spices on your cupboard and a supply of cheap eggplant like the H-Mart. And it is also each vegan and gluten-free, so you can serve it to pretty a lot everybody you is probably inviting over to dinner.
Which brings me to a query I've been thinking about for 2020: want to the Recipe of the Month come to be the Vegan Recipe of the Month? When I first began the Veggie of the Month function again in 2013, my goal changed into to boom the amount of produce in my diet, and once I decided that trying a new fruit or veggie each month wasn't the fine way to do that, I changed it to be a modern day produce-focused recipe. But in the past yr, my primary nutritional consciousness has been a good deal much less on consuming extra produce for my private health and extra on promoting the fitness of the planet through averting animal products. So want to my Recipe of the Month additionally paintings towards that purpose?
This plan wouldn't be too hard to put into effect. While in Indianapolis, we made our usual annual foray out to Half Price Books, and one of the items I picked up there was a new-to-us vegan cookbook, Conveniently Vegan, which contains lots of simple plant-based dishes for us to try. And my subscription to It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken is dropping new vegan recipes in my inbox twice a week as well. Between these two sources, I've already got a short list of new vegan dishes I want to try, so I should have no problem coming up with a new one each month.
The only downside I can see is that if I stick to 100 percent vegan dishes for these monthly experiments, I could miss out on some wonderful discoveries like the Raspberry Fool I made in July 2018. But on the other hand, that was technically a bonus recipe; I'd already done a Recipe of the Month for July, and it didn't stop me from experimenting further. So I figure, as long as I allow myself to try new dishes that aren't vegan, requiring myself to try at least one new dish each month that is vegan will be a good way to expand our plant-based repertoire and shift our diet gradually closer to our ideal.
