Baingan bhaja is so easy to make that this post barely qualifies as a "recipe" – and yet it is one of those dishes of which the taste belies the simplicity.
A staple side dish with meals in a typical Bihari home, a quickly made add-on to liven up a dal-chawal-chokha meal. That’s baingan bhaja for you.
As promised in the last post on moong dal salad, here comes my recipe for eggplant tomato curry.
I most often use the fat purple eggplant for bharta, but on long workdays the whole roasting process seems too labor-intensive and I want to make a curry that moves from kitchen to dinner table quickly. This no-onion-no-garlic recipe is a godsend on such days.
Green eggplant in mustard-fenugreek masala is not for the faint-hearted. The spices in this are heavier and headier than, say, in bittersweet baingan. Try it if you dare!
I made this dish with long green eggplant, which is the mildest-tasting variety of eggplant I know of. The eggplant’s blandness gives a nice base to the strong flavors of the spices.
This eggplant fry recipe makes a great side dish, especially when the rest of your meal is low on spices. It’s often on my menu for a quick weekday dinner, with boiled rice, raita and simple pressure-cooked yellow dal. Which is not to say that it does not work well with a lavish party meal but yes, it does add a special je ne sais quoi to otherwise masala-free fare.
Poppy seeds are a relatively new addition to my pantry and I keep a lookout for ways to expand my repertoire with them. I usually turn to Bengali cuisine for inspiration with this spice – aloo posto is a constant favorite. In a net search for poppy seed recipes, Sailu’s recipe for baby eggplant in an Andhra-style poppy seed gravy caught my attention: the sweet notes of jaggery and the tang of tamarind sounded like delightful additions to the base of poppy seed paste.
Onions are indispensable to cooking in many Indian households, so much so that the humble bulb has caused governments to topple. To those for whom curries without onions seem inconceivable, I heartily recommend this recipe for stuffed baby eggplant in peanut sesame sauce. The sauce, with tamarind juice to give it body, is rich, thick, and entirely sans onions. I like to make this gravy when I have guests over, especially my no-onion-no-garlic folks.
The big purple eggplant is generally used for baingan bharta in my kitchen. Not so tonight. A yummy eggplant-ginger chutney awaits the rice that’s still cooking.