I bought two huge eggplants (aka aubergines) at 98 cents each.  I don’t usually like eggplant, and the only thing I know about cooking eggplant is that when you do it wrong it’s horrible.  But I could feed a crowd with these two eggplants alone!

So I asked many people online what to do with an eggplant?  After all, this is a lot of eggplant, and if me and many others have to eat it, I want it to taste good!

One person said “when I think of eggplant, I think of jambalaya”.  Jambalaya!  When I think of jambalaya, I think of the Hank Williams song, but jambalaya is an idea I can get behind!  Throw lots of stuff into a pot and feed everyone!  I love this plan!

One person gave me a recipe for grilled eggplant.  Okay….   For some reason I actually followed it, but let me tell you how nervous I was following it.  It’s the exact thing I fear can go wrong–in jambalaya, for example, the eggplant may not be fabulous, but there is enough there to cover it, where as if it stands on its own, if no one likes it, there is no hiding it.  At first look it was a complicated recipe, making me more nervous.  However, I’m going to spoil the surprise here, it was fabulous!  But since jambalaya takes longer, I started doing that first.

I’ve never made jambalaya before, so I did some googling and found several recipes, and kind of mishmashed the recipes together.  I used these ingredients:

  • Three yellow onions
  • Lots of garlic
  • One of each type of spicy pepper I found at the store.  This was an habanero, a “spicy red” (pequillo?), a poblano, and a “spicy yellow” (no idea).  I skipped the jalapeño and serrano peppers.
  • Two small cans of tomato paste
  • A small package of spicy sausage
  • Ham from roommate (it’s been an ingredient four weeks now?)
  • A pint of rice (American pint, not British, 473ml, someone asked)
  • Some carrots
  • Three green bell peppers
  • A bunch of celery
  • No eggplant?

I started this about three hours before I expected people to arrive.  I chopped the onions and threw them in the pot with water, and turned on the water to boil.  I added one can of tomato paste and stirred, waiting for them to cook down.  I started chopping up other stuff, being impatient.  After the onions started to visibly boil down (originally they took up half the pot!), I started everything else.  In a separate pan, I cooked the spicy peppers with olive oil, threw them in, stir fried the spicy sausauge in the same pan (yes I know it’s already cooked, but…) , threw it in, cooked up the garlic, threw it in, cooked up the han (yes still the same pan, and yes it’s already cooked too), threw it in.

I added a lot of water, another can of tomato paste (wasn’t quite red enough), then threw in the pint of rice.  At this point the danger of sticking to the bottom of the pan kicked in.  I stirred furiously, and fortunately others started showing up, and I set them to stirring furiously.  Many people on the internet say “don’t stir jambalaya”, but I know what burnt tastes like, and let me tell you, I’m willing to risk the perils of stirring to prevent the entire mess from sticking to the bottom.  I might have been able to get away with a little less stirring if I had only used one can of tomato paste, or less rice, but once you’ve reached that thickness, keep stirring.

About this time I threw in the carrots too, and really started on the eggplant recipe while my stirrers were furiously stirring, but since it’s easier to write out the recipes one at a time, towards the end I threw in the celery and green peppers, because I like a little crunch in my food.

For the eggplant, I carefully followed the recipe my friend gave me.  I conveniently had all the ingredients already, except hoisin sauce, which I didn’t use.  I doubled the amounts of everything compared to the original recipe.

  • Two large eggplants
  • rice-wine vinegar
  • soy sauce (er wait I didn’t have this already I borrowed it from downstairs neighbors)
  • toasted sesame oil
  • brown sugar
  • minced fresh ginger
  • minced garlic (I don’t have a press, so I chop it small, then crush it with the flat of my knife–same with ginger)
  • oil
  • scallions (which I forgot to use)

I cut the eggplants into quarters, and according to my friend’s directions, not the website, I carefully removed half the peels.  Half?  She made it quite explicit that you had to remove half the peels, or else it would be bitter.  So I did.  I mixed the vinegar, soy sauce, sesame seed oil, sugar, ginger, and garlic in a bowl, and stirred it.  It smelled awesome!  In a cast iron pan, since I don’t have a convenient grill to use, I put some oil, heated it hot, and put eggplant slices.  I gingerly (no pun intended) covered the eggplants with my mixture, and then flipped the eggplants, and covered the other sides too.  Since the jambalaya was taking longer to cook than I expected and people were starting to show up (good thing too, or else I wouldn’t have a stirrer and the rice would stick), I put the grilled eggplants out on a plate while we waited for the jambalaya to cook.

And the results?  The eggplant was fabulous!  No bitterness, which I was afraid of, and only some of the not so well cooked pieces went down the “slimy eggplant” route, which no one complained about (I suppose the cook is the biggest critic).  Everyone loved the jambalaya–I could complain the rice could use a little more cooking or that half the veggies I meant to put in (including eggplant) I didn’t because I was chopping as fast as I could.  Having said all this, I thought it was tasty too.

Lesson for next time?  Next time I start earlier.  Most of the “how to cook jambalaya” articles on the internet said two hours, so I figured three would be enough, but typical of soups and stews, longer is better.