Recipe of the month: Winter squash and eggplant curry

On our last trip to H-Mart, Brian succumbed, as usual, to the siren song of cheap eggplant. (The skinny Chinese eggplants are frequently on sale for less than a dollar a pound, and Brian just can't resist them.) His original plan was to make it into bangan bartha, part of our standard recipe rotation. However, when I mentioned that we still needed a Recipe of the Month for December (and didn't have much time to make it, since we'd be spending Christmas week with the in-laws in Indiana), he decided to hunt around for a new eggplant recipe instead. He hit upon this Oven-Roasted Eggplant and Butternut Squash Curry recipe on Food.com, and since we already had a full year's harvest of butternut squash stored away, he thought it looked like a perfect choice. The only ingredient it called for that we didn't have were scallions (which he didn't think it really needed, since it contains onion already) and fresh cilantro (which I don't care for anyway, so he had no problem 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 seemed rather unnecessary to Brian, since he knew that it was perfectly possible—and much faster—to roast eggplant by cutting it into cubes. That's what he normally does when making bartha, and it comes out just fine. So he created a simplified version of the recipe with the eggplant and squash cooked this way and simply mixed into the masala. He also improved on the masala itself by using whole fenugreek seeds, sauteed along with the cumin seeds, rather than ground fenugreek. And where the recipe called for fresh tomatoes, Brian used a combination of fresh and canned—the last two little tomatoes from our 2019 harvest, and enough canned diced tomatoes to make up a cup of volume.

Here's Brian's modified version of the recipe:

Cut into 1/2-inch cubes, coat with 1 Tbsp olive oil, and roast 45 minutes at 450 degrees F:

20 oz. butternut squash

10 oz eggplant

Prepare masala:

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsp cumin seeds

20 fenugreek seeds

1 onion, finely chopped

1 c diced tomato

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/4 tsp turmeric

3/4 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 done, combine 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 super fast to make; counting chopping time, it probably takes a good hour from start to finish. But it's pretty easy and pretty cheap, especially if you have all the spices in your cupboard and a source of cheap eggplant like the H-Mart. And it's also both vegan and gluten-free, so you can serve it to pretty much anyone you might be inviting over to dinner.

Which brings me to a question I've been considering for 2020: should the Recipe of the Month become the Vegan Recipe of the Month? When I first started the Veggie of the Month feature back in 2013, my goal was to increase the amount of produce in my diet, and when I discovered that trying a new fruit or veggie each month wasn't the best way to do that, I modified it to be a new produce-centered recipe. But in the past year, my main dietary focus has been less on eating more produce for my own health and more on promoting the health of the planet by avoiding animal products. So should my Recipe of the Month also work toward that goal?

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.