Summer’s Bounty: Spice Eggplant Stir Fry

June is bustin’ out all over, and so is the garden! Tomatoes, peppers, radishes, cucumbers, carrots, lettuces, herbs… It’s a veritable cornucopia of deliciousness.

I’ve waxed rhapsodic about the harvest boxes we get from Conundrum Farms before. In the latest box, we got some gorgeous Japanese eggplant, garlic, and peppers, so I decided to play around a little.

We love a good stir fry in this house, so I wanted to branch out from my usual Mediterranean/Middle Eastern eggplant creations, and this is the result.

Spicy Stir-Fried Eggplant

Ingredients

1 serrano pepper, or 2 jalapeños, chopped (to cut down on the heat, remove the seeds and ribs from the peppers)
4 to 5 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 1-inch knob of ginger, peeled and grated
4 green onions, chopped, whites and greens separated for different uses
2 tablespoons of a neutral oil that can take high heat, like canola or grapeseed oil (I used grapeseed oil)
2 to 3 Japanese or Chinese eggplant, or 1 ½ to 2 pounds of any other variety of eggplant, diced (you can peel it, but why make more work for yourself?)
¼ cup unseasoned rice vinegar
Juice of 2 limes
¼ cup low sodium soy sauce
1 heaping tablespoon cornstarch
1 scant tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder (this is a mixture of star anise, cinnamon, cloves, Sichuan pepper, and fennel seed and is delicious with eggplant)
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Directions

Be sure to have all of your ingredients ready before you start cooking. This is called, in slightly pretentious chef-speak, mise en place, often abbreviated to mise. Or, if you don’t want to be snotty, everything in its place. It’s a sensible way to cook – get all of your chopping, dicing, mincing, grating, and measuring out of the way before you put everything together. You especially want to have your mise (sorry) ready before stir frying, as a stir fry demands quick cooking over high heat.

In a small bowl, combine the vinegar, lime juice, soy sauce, cornstarch, sugar, and Chinese five-spice powder. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a large skillet or sauté pan over high heat until you can see heat ripples in the oil. You need to get the oil ripping hot for a good stir fry. Add the chiles, garlic, and whites of the green onions and cook, flipping the vegetables or stirring almost constantly until you can smell the garlic and ginger. This should take, if your oil is hot enough, less than a minute.

Add the eggplant and continue to flip or stir for about 3 to 4 minutes, or until the eggplant has softened.

Give the vinegar mixture a quick stir because the cornstarch will have settled in the bottom of the bowl and add it to the eggplant. Continuing to flip or stir, bring the mixture to a boil. Continue to stir or flip until the sauce has thickened, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Remove from the heat and add the green tops of the green onions and sesame oil, stirring or flipping to combine. Serve over rice or noodles as a side or as a main dish. Serves 4 as a side or 2 as a main.