I came home from the Writing Center work early today, and found Patrick working at his computer. It was about lunch time. Since I had a few Thai eggplants at hand, I decided to make Thai-flavored quick lunch for the two of us. (The small roundish veggies with beautiful green net pattern are the Thai eggplants, available in some ethnic groceries. We got ours at the H Mart.) To the ingredients in the photo, I added a bunch of cilantro, a bit of ginger and chicken thigh. I prefer chicken thigh in stewed dishes, because thighs have more flavor--I know that extra flavor comes from the extra fat, but, hey, if you eat meat, eat the tasty part, that's my philosophy.

So I cut up the veggies and the chicken, and heated the coconut oil (the part that separates from the solid white mass in a can of coconut milk) in a pot, then threw in the ginger bits. When the oil was hot, I sautéed the chicken, added the veggies and stir-fried them until they were slightly cooked. Then I added the remaining can of coconut milk (stirred) and a generous spoonful of green curry paste. It took about twenty minutes for the ingredients to cook, which was enough time to cook the jasmine rice and brown rice. I added a bit of brown rice, just because we were low on jasmine rice. Just before serving (and photographing, of course), I added a bit of nam pla (Thai fish sauce) and a pinch of sugar to boost the flavor.

The curry turned out fine, but there was a surprise. It was my first time to cook with Thai eggplants, so I figured I would use them just as I do with Japanese or Italian ones. When I bit into the soft flesh of the eggplant, though, I noticed that it was much more bitter than the ones I was used to. The bitterness almost felt biting. Could this be poisonous? I thought. Maybe there was a specific procedure to drain of it its poisonous content, like one need to do with some ingredients. Uh-oh, are we going to have horrible stomach aches later?

I ran to the computer and looked up the Thai eggplants before we ate too much of it. To my relief, none of the entries said anything about them being poisonous or requiring some esoteric procedure to tame them. Some Japanese people like to let their slices of eggplants swim in cold water for a while before cooking them (to release the bitterness), so I figured the Thai eggplants have more of that bitter stuff than the Japanese ones. In fact, once we got used to the bitterness, it became sort of addictive. It's been only a few hours since we ate all our eggplant curry, so it remains to be seen if we'll get sick or not, but I'm pretty certain we'll be fine.

If this blog suddenly gets abandoned, maybe that's when you know you should be careful about those Thai eggplants.