Recipe of the Month: Eggplant-Green Bean Curry

After wrapping up Thrift Week this Wednesday, I had a look at the calendar and realized that I would only have one more weekend to squeeze in my Recipe of the Month for January. So, with the clock ticking, I turned to Brian for help. We happened to have some Chinese eggplant in the veggie bin, so he started thinking about what he could do with it that would be different enough from any of our previous dishes to be definitely considered a new recipe. Realizing that we also had several cans of coconut milk in the pantry (for a while we were picking up a can every time we went to Trader Joe's, not remembering that we already had some), he decided to do a search on "eggplant coconut milk," and the first hit was a recipe for Seared Eggplant and Coconut Milk Curry on Food and Wine. And since we just happened to have all the other ingredients on hand—and he also happens to really like coconut milk curry—he looked no further.

However, he did make a few modifications to the recipe as written. First, he scaled it up by about 50 percent so that he could use a whole can of coconut milk rather than the cup the recipe called for (which would have left him with an awkward half-cup or so to use up somehow). Then, since he thought the meal could use a green vegetable, he decided to add around 6 ounces of green beans along with the eggplant. (He'd used this veggie combo in other dishes, so he knew they would go well together, and it seemed like less work than cooking the beans separately.)

Finally, rather than pan-searing the veggies as the recipe instructed, he decided to roast them under the broiler. He'd used this technique before, and he knew that it would cook the eggplant through without making it mushy, and it wouldn't require as much oil. His procedure goes like this:

1. Spread the veggies on a pan and toss them with a tablespoon or so of olive oil, just enough to coat them.
2. Put them under the broiler for about ten minutes, moving the pan around the oven a couple of times during the process to make sure all parts of it get heated thoroughly.
3. Take out the pan, flip the veggies with a spatula, and return it to the broiler for another five minutes.

So he did all this in place of Step 1 in the recipe, and then for Step 2, he cooked the onion, garlic, and ginger in the pan by themselves. Then he added the coconut milk and other ingredients, stirred in the roasted veggies, and heated it through. He served it over rice as the recipe suggested, but left out the cilantro garnish because it's the middle of the friggin' winter (and I don't care much for cilantro anyway).

This came out tasting pretty much like you'd expect, based on the ingredients. It was much more like a Thai curry than an Indian one, but fairly mild (since he did not include the optional Thai chili, which we didn't happen to have). Both of us liked it, but Brian was much more enthusiastic about it than I was. I finished one bowlful with pleasure, but didn't care for more, while he went eagerly back for seconds and was happy to eat the leftovers for lunch the next day. (Not all the leftovers, mind you—the original recipe was supposed to be enough for four, so Brian's scaled-up version could probably feed six, leaving us with at least two more servings in the fridge for future lunches.)

As for the key question, would we make this dish again, I personally could go either way. I wouldn't be in any hurry to make it again, but I would quite willingly eat it again if it were put in front of me. But considering how much Brian liked it, and how cheap Chinese eggplants often are at the H-Mart, I think it's a safe bet to say this will probably become a regular part of our dinner repertoire.