Roasted eggplant and peanut sauce
I finished off the rest of our eggplant last night by roasting it and complementing it with some mixed vegetables, turkey meatballs, and a Thai peanut sauce.
As with just about everything I cook at home, the meal wasn’t complicated, and it was based largely on recipes I found online. The first order of business was setting up the roasted eggplant per this New York Times recipe. That meant cutting up and sweating the eggplant, and then during that process preparing a baking sheet with some olive oil and waiting for the oven to heat up to 450 degrees.
Also while the oven heated up, I got together ingredients for a simple Thai-inspired peanut sauce. I knew we had an extra can of coconut milk in the pantry, plenty of peanut butter, and instead of red curry paste I went with some trusty Huy Fong garlic chili sauce. Since our peanut butter is Skippy (full of all sorts of other stuff besides peanuts and salt, including sugar), I didn’t add any extra salt and only a little extra sugar. I also guesstimated all my measurements, since the recipe calls for everything to be whisked together in a heated pot.
For the vegetables, I mixed some frozen chopped kale with a bunch of snow peas and some Thai basil, then added microwaveable turkey meatballs. Like I said: easy.
At some point in all that, while the vegetables were in a pan and the peanut sauce had come off the stove to start resting, I got the eggplant onto its pan and shoved it in the oven to roast. Since these are the narrower Asian variety of eggplant, they only needed 15 minutes in the oven, and then about 10 minutes resting in a colander afterward.
I’ve got a ton of leftover peanut sauce, and so the Co-Pilot and I are figuring out what we might do with it. I’m bringing a small helping to work, but after that, we’ve still got a full bowl of the stuff. Suggestions welcome.
