Potato Eggplant Curry

This recipe came to me through the “How to Cook Great” site on YouTube. Click here for an instructive video that produces almost exactly what I will describe in this post. The following recipe will make 4-5 servings of a delicious vegan curry.

For some of the ingredients, you will need to shop at an Indian grocery—especially if you want the dish to taste authentic. These ingredients are marked in the text by IND in square brackets: [IND].

I typically use a largish nonstick pot that has a cover for the final stage of cooking.

On to the recipe:

  1. Put several tablespoons of sunflower seed oil in the pot and turn to heat to moderate high.
  2. When the oil is hot, add a several tablespoons of black mustard seeds [IND] and cumin seed (also known as jeera) [IND] and watch the seeds pop. Stir for up to a minute.
  3. Take two largish russet potatoes, peel them, and cut into pieces slightly smaller than 1 cubic inch. Stir for several minutes.
  4. Add a large dollop of garlic ginger paste [IND] and stir in.
  5. Add salt to taste,
  6. Slice one medium size red onion and stir into the mix. Stir for a couple of minutes.
  7. Add the following three spices, approximately one heaping tablespoon of each: (a) haldi turmeric [IND], (b) cumin, and (c) (if desired) a hot chile powder. For the chile powder, you can substitute Hungarian paprika if you can’t handle the heat. Stir.
  8. Dice into pieces a medium to large eggplant and add to the mix. Continue stirring.
  9. If you like spicy food, mice one jalapeño or two serrano chile peppers.
  10. Cut up four or five small tomatoes and add to the pot. Stir.
  11. Turn down the heat to medium low, cover the pot, and cook for ten to twenty minutes.
  12. Chop a handful of cilantro and add before serving.

Our Salvation Lies in Robots?

Some of the Food Offerings at India Sweets & Spices

About once a week on the average, I drop in for a quick lunch at India Sweets & Spices in Culver City. The vegetarian curries are tasty and not overly expensive, and one does not have a order a meal too big to finish.

As I entered the store, I was greeted by a garrulous retiree who was sitting at one of the outside tables. As is my custom, I answered him politely, but in the 1930s Hungarian rural dialect which I adopt when trying to avoid a chatty individual.

He took the hint quickly while I passed inside to order a samosa and lentil fritter. When I came out with my food, I had to sit at a table within earshot of him. He was regaling one of his captives with an encomium on robots and how they were going to replace surgeons. Someone looking at my face at that point would have guessed that I had just smelled something foul.

You can’t talk about robots without talking about computer algorithms. And I was a person who had just spent an hour explaining to my pharmaceutical mail order firm—three times—that I am not Hispanic (marque dos) before getting to speak to a human being. If most companies cannot reasonably handle automated phone attendants, why would I submit to a computer algorithm with my body for surgery?

Fortunately I was able to finish my vegetarian snack quickly and vanish from sight before hooting derisively.

Currying Flavor

A Vegetarian Curry

The biggest change in my diet since the Covid lockdown has been my growing preference for cooking vegetarian curries. This has dismayed Martine, as she is a confirmed avivore, especially of chicken and turkey. Before, I have been cooking various pasta and rice dishes with ground turkey; but of late, I have tended to avoid ground meat.

Although I have always like curries, my preference has always been for vegetarian curries. That could be the influence of my old friend Mohan Gopalakrishnan, a Brahmin, but I have always thought that Indian cuisine has by far the tastiest vegetarian recipes. It has gotten to the point that I disdain bland American vegetarian dishes. (There are, however, a few Hungarian vegetarian dishes that I’ve always loved.)

Today I cooked up a potato, cauliflower, tomato, and pea curry with a diced-up Serrano chile. To jack up the hotness, I added a little super-hot Indian chile powder. To cool down the dish slightly, I served it with mango chutney and some plain yogurt.

The spices used include black mustard seeds, cumin seeds, turmeric, and garam masala (which is mostly cardamom). The great thing about Indian cuisine is that you can vary the spices and consequently the flavor quite easily. Of course, it helps to have an Indian food store nearby. I usually go to India Sweets and Spices in Culver City. They also have a very decent lunch counter which I patronize regularly.

Crossroads

The one part of Asia that I would like to visit is the island nation of Singapore. To me, it is like China and India rolled into one convenient package, yet not too far from its British colonial heritage to force me to learn a difficult new language.

What particularly earns it a spot on my travel bucket list is the cuisine. I love both Chinese and Indian food, and Singapore is known for both, as well as several adjoining cuisines such as Thai and Malayan.

In fact, I cannot imagine myself losing weight during a Singapore visit. And that’s when I’m not drinking cold beers at the Writers’ Bar at the Raffles Hotel—the height of colonial decadence,

Of course I would fly there on Singapore Airlines and hang out a while at Changi Airport, reputed to be the most interesting airport in the world.