dorchadas: (Zombies together!)
[personal profile] dorchadas
This curry tasted pretty good and I hated it.

Let's talk about me. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that I have a lot of weird sensory issues with food. My dislike of shredded lettuce despite having a salad with full lettuce leaves every workday for lunch is probably the most obvious manifestation of this, but the quirk (yeah, we'll go with that Emoji Oh dear) most relevant to this post is that I really dislike any foods that are too squidgy. This usually manifests itself in my hating most salad dressings and refusing to eat any salad that doesn't have leaves in it, but relative to the topic of this post, it also shows up in that I typically do not like eggplant, and I especially dislike it when it's been simmered in any fashion and lost some of its structure. There are certain circumstances where I'll eat it, like in Japanese restaurants when it's been fried and is served with a miso-based sauce, but overall I just avoid it.

But this isn't Fifty Weeks, Forty-Nine Curries, so.

Week 44 - 1 Ingredients

Slight departure from procedure; the eggplant is already chopped.

The actual curry part tasted quite good. Though notice there that I'm defining the part that I like as the curry and the eggplant as some kind of foreign invader that contaminated the delicious curry that I would have otherwise have gotten to eat. And, well, that's kind of how I think about it. The onions and spices and tamarind and ginger and so on was great, but there were a bunch of limpid eggplant chunks that I had to force myself to eat in order to get an accurate feeling for how the curry was really supposed to be. And the answer to that is "It's not for me, really."

I didn't finish the curry. By the end of it, I was eating around the eggplant chunks and I almost didn't finish dinner because my stomach was roiling. Even thinking about it now is making me slightly nauseous. I told [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd that the leftovers were all hers, and her response can be summed up as a milder version of Emoji pissed off.

Week 44 - 2 Onions frying

Hello onions my old friend...

Words from the Chef
Knowing how [personal profile] dorchadas feels about eggplant, I wasn't super excited to make this curry. I think the only one I feel a similar "this is not going to end well" feel is the creamy potato curry because if [personal profile] dorchadas hates anything more than eggplant in curry, it's potato salad like things. Anyway, this curry was straight forward to make without a lot of fuss or steps. Maybe if I'd used whole baby eggplants that I couldn't find (and we had a perfectly good large one in the fridge) then it would have gone better. I don't think that's the case since eggplant is eggplant to [personal profile] dorchadas. One good tip was to soak the eggplant to remove some of the bitterness and I'll probably use that when I cook eggplant in the future. Overall, the spices were good but even I, who loves eggplant in all things, couldn't get into it. Ah well.


Week 44 - 3 pre-eggplant

The good part, pre-eggplant contamination.

The highlight of the meal wasn't the curry at all, even the part that I could eat without difficulty. It was a Greek salad that [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd had originally made for her lunches this week, but she made too much and had a lot leftover. It was perfect. Just a bit of oil and vinegar for dressing, goat cheese instead of feta--not that feta is bad, but goat cheese is better--kalamata olives...I ended up eating that with a lot more relish than I ate the curry. Though even that trailed off as I ate more and more eggplant and got less and less interested in food.

I mean, I just went to Lickity Split and I didn't eat anything. It's two hours after dinner and my stomach is still grumbling at me for what I subjected it to. This isn't quite the disaster that chicken dopiaza was, but it's pretty close.

Week 44 - 4 finished meal

Look at that salad. It was delicious.

So that's eggplant curry. Brought down not by any flaw inherent in itself, but rather by my reaction to it. And these are my blog posts, so that's what matters. If you like eggplant, I'd actually recommend it, but it's definitely not for me.

Would I Eat It Again?: Perish the thought.
Do I Prefer It to the Usual Thai Curry?: Emoji Fuckoff hammer
What Would I Change?: Replace the eggplant with a different vegetable and it'd actually be pretty good, I think. Maybe zucchini or tomatoes.