Timely Snow

(L-R) Sujai Kumar, Fang Ge, Zhou Xiaobin [since it’s a Chinese restaurant, Chinese names are presented surname-first}

(L-R) Meg Schleppenbach, Neesha Noronha, Wu Di

Professor Fang Ge, my collaborator from the Institute of Psychology in Beijing, is visiting us this week. Last night we went out to the Mandarin Wok, which is probably the best Chinese restaurant in Champaign. I’d never been there before, except to pick up some takeout food, and it was very interesting. It had a very extensive Chinese menu on the wall and a much smaller and different English menu. They had 鱼香茄子(yu xiang qie zi—fish-flavored eggplant) and 豆苗 (dou miao, bean shoots), the last of which I haven’t seen in a US restaurant.

Here’s a recipe for the eggplant dish, which shows the “stone soup” feature of many Chinese recipes (as well as the fact that there’s nothing fish-connected about this dish)

Fish Flavored Eggplant
Ingredients

250g eggplant
50g chilli bean sauce

Preparations

1.Peel and score the eggplants, cut into chunks and deep-fry till soft, remove.

2.Fry chilli bean sauce till the flavor comes out, add finely chopped scallion and ginger, put in white sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, clear soup and the egg plants, thicken with cornstarch solution.

Two things are interesting:

1. There are only two ingredients to this dish!
2. You’d be unlikely to be able to actually make it based on these recipes unless you had a fair amount of experience with Chinese cuisine. (And I would brown sugar instead of white sugar, by the way, and I would add some hot peppers).

I’ll see if I can find a more useful recipe in a book and type it in, because this is a very good dish. It’s not hard to make, although it helps if you have a really hot stove.

Here’s a better recipe (although it’s called “Szechwan eggplant”)

Szechwan Eggplant
3 tablespoons oil
1 pound eggplant, cut into dice
4 garlic, minced
2 tablespoons fresh ginger, minced
4 scallions (white and green), minced
1 handful hot red peppers, whole (about 10)
2 tablespoons prepared chili paste with garlic
2 tablespoons rice wine or dry sherry
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/2 tablespoon sugar, optional
1 tablespoon chekiang black vinegar or 2 tablespoon wine vinegar
1/2 cup water or broth
2 tablespoons sesame oil
Heat oil to high and add eggplant. This recipe does not call for the eggplant to be pretreated. Stir-fry a minute. Add garlic, ginger, [hot red peppers,] and scallions. Stir-fry a minute. Add all the rest of the ingredients. Stir-cook 3 minutes over high heat. Reduce heat and let stew 10 minutes or until eggplant is tender. Serve with rice.

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