I'm making an effort to make my pictures more appetizing. Look, shiny vegetables!

So after the previous eggplant peanut business, I was left a little unsatisfied. I wanted a more stewy, curry-oriented eggplant. Ok, we can do that.

I am not really intuitive at non-Indian curries, so I didn't want to completely make things up. So after failing to find any sort of tasty peanutty coconut milky curry in my of my cookbooks, I went and looked on The Internet. I decided to base my curry on this satay sauce: clearly easy yet delicious, and easily modifiable to get rid of things like vegetable oil. Then I could just steam the eggplant and zucchini, and mix it all together to whack over a grain of some type.

Eggplant and zucchini with satay sauce and soba

a couple little eggplants, or one big one
a couple or three zucchini
other vegetables that sound delicious, like red pepper
peanut butter
olive oil
garlic
water
coconut milk
a lime
red curry paste
a hot pepper, serrano this time
salt
molasses
soba noodles

First make sauce. Peel and mince a couple cloves of garlic and a hot pepper; cook them slowly in some olive oil. When they are nice and soft, add several big spoonfuls of peanut butter, a can of coconut milk, some water, the juice of a lime, a little red curry paste, a big pinch of salt, and half a spoonful of molasses. Turn up the heat and stir to melt the peanut butter. This whole business will be pretty light-colored at first; it will darken as it simmers down.

So. Bring the pot to a boil, lower to simmer, and let cook. Keep an eye on it and stir it fairly often. It will bubble ferociously, then eventually reduce into a thick peanut sauce.

While the sauce is becoming delicious, prep the eggplant and zucchini. I actually peeled them, if you can believe it. You don't have to, but you can. It won't make much of a difference to the zucchini, but will make the eggplant a little more tender and melty. Chop eggplant and zucchini into big half-moon chunks. At this point you have a choice of how to cook them. I steamed them by just sticking a steamer basket over the sauce: I cooked the eggplant for five minutes, added the zucchini, and cooked another five. You could also cook them by simmering in the sauce itself if you wanted to. You could also roast them in the oven or on the barbecue if you wanted the sauce to be more of an actual sauce and less of a stewy curry.

Also, cook some soba or other delicious noodle. Rice noodles would be pretty good here too. You could also clearly use practically any grain that likes saucy curry, or just cook and add enough vegetables not to need anything else.

When everything is done, toss the cooked vegetables into the sauce. Stir it all up to coat well and rewarm if necessary. Serve over soba.

EAT VORACIOUSLY.

The food has been really good this week. Maybe it's been such a bad week that the food is the only good thing in it. Well. That is ok. It is the weekend.