Booniverse

And now, half way into December, I present to you the first of the Veggycentric recipe posts. We’re moving sort of slow on the veggy front but we’re at least making progress. This recipe sounded intriguing because it had curry (was curried?) and also eggplant. The only thing I really knew about eggplant up to this point was that they were purple and a lot of people didn’t like them. It seems that eggplant is sort of the vegetarian pork chop: Beautiful when done right but botched more often than not. Anyhow, the original recipe is here and below the cut is our rendition.

Navy Beans and Eggplant Curry

INGREDIENTS
1 (16-ounce) can navy Beans, drained and rinsed
1 medium eggplant, peeled and cubed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons vegetable oil, divided
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon cumin
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3/4 cup vegetable stock
2 carrots, sliced
2 cups potatoes, diced
1 green bell pepper, sliced
2 cups onions, chopped
2 cups cauliflower florets
2 medium zucchini, sliced
2 cups tomatoes, peeled and chopped, reserving liquid
1/4 cup raisins
8 tablespoons plain lowfat yogurt

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Place eggplant cubes in a colander and sprinkle evenly with salt. Set aside for 30 minutes to dry.
2. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large nonstick skillet. Add eggplant and cook, stirring often, for about 5 minutes. Remove eggplant from pan and set aside.
3. Heat remaining oil in skillet and add curry, cumin, garlic, and pepper. Stir in stock, and cook for 2 minutes.
4. Add carrots, potatoes, green pepper, onions, and cauliflower. Cover and simmer for 5 to 7 minutes.
5. Return the eggplant to the pan and add beans, zucchini tomatoes, and raisins. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes.
6. Serve with a dollop of yogurt.

Makes 8 servings

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION (per serving)
Servings per recipe: 8
Serving size: 1 1/2 cups
Calories: 310
Carbohydrates: 58g
Fat: 4g
Cholesterol: 2mg
Protein: 10g
Fiber: 9g
Sodium: 377mg (595mg using canned beans)

FOOD EXCHANGES
2 starch/bread
1 lean meat
2 fruit

Recipe provided courtesy Michigan Bean Commission.

PRODUCTION NOTES
1. Eggplant! Did you know that you skin eggplant? Apparently the skin is part of the bitter eggplant problem. They aren’t easy to skin though, nosiree bob! Eggplant are also the texture of foam rubber which is both fun and disturbing. Also also, they want you to salt them and sit them aside for 30 minute to dry them out or something. We were running late so 20 minutes was the new 30 minutes. Incidentally, eggplant would make a pretty good stir fry ingredient if you roasted it up as suggested and added it last to keep it nice and firm. TheMan had a piece of roasted eggplant and found it quite yum. When we simmered the eggplant with the rest of the dish however, the texture got a little moodgi.

2. Goodness people, did you READ the ingredients? How big are these people’s skillets? We had the pepper, zucchini and eggplant prepped and just those alone filled up one of the bigger tuppers. We wound up cutting down the onions to about 1 cup, the potatoes to just 2 (maybe 1 to 1.5 cups?) half a cauliflower (less than 2 cups) and we nixed the raisins because they sounded weird. Also…see way too much stuff in our skillet. As it was, we had to fire up an auxiliary skillet to hold everything.

3. This was a weirdly mild dish, probably because the spice to stuff ratio is off. I’d double the spices while halving the veggies, unless you have a super large skillet. Extra super large. I’d still double the spices.

4. The yogurt makes this dish. Yum. This dish also ages extremely well, the day after we made it the spice was a little more kicky and nicely mixed in. Mmmm.

2008: Did you know binkies have a right way up and a wrong way up?

2007: JSFR: Meltykiss (framboise)

2006: I do feel pretty bad-ass with my 1337 new scanner & PDFing skills. Ph33r M3!

2005: While string beans may be very tasty, and indeed they are, and candy cane chocolate chip cookie doodads may also be very tasty, and THEY are, mixing the two is pretty vile. I’m just sayin.

2004: Of course I was way too lazy to make it last night so instead I measured out all the ingredients, mixed what I could and left it all out (save the eggs) to pick up first thing in the morning. Yup, I’m that lazy.

2003: “Hi, my name is boo and I can’t let unwrapped Christmas gifts lie.”

2002: I’m not used to seeing 2002 down here, guess I wont post back then.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.