I just gobbled down a whole eggplant and I want to talk about it!!
Inspired by Hetty Lui McKinnon on
Splendid Table Podcast.
First of all… it involved homemade black bean sauce—seriously, who’d’ve thought? But she explained it so simply I had to try…. She gave no measurements just said something like…
Get some fermented black (soy) beans at your Asian grocery store. Take some and rinse them to get the extra salt crystals off. Add minced garlic and some red chili, maybe flakes or fresh or roasted. Then add oil and mash it all together. The only oils I had were olive, lard, butter and sesame, so sesame it was! I used a potato masher, the waffle kind, but if you have a food processor even better. It is so easy and the results are simply amazing!! Mine looks more like a paste than a sauce.
So for the eggplant I just peeled, cubed, and steamed the standard globe kind until it was a little overdone, real soft. For the sauce I took some of that black bean paste, added this date syrup I found on clearance at WalMart, and some prune jam that’s been sitting in my fridge untouched for two years.
Had the sauced eggplant over rice garnished with sesame seeds, green onion, and rooster sauce. My god.

Holy whack-a-doodle—Level up! It didn’t need the garnish. And I added a bit too much of the sweet stuff but what’s cool is that it hit sweet and finished salty-umami. And so easy
