Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where I kind of wish I didn’t go quite so crazy last week, because now I have nothing for left-overs. I’m your Regretful Retro-Raver, Jon O’Guin, and…I am, mentally, more than a little busted up, and don’t know what I’m going to do. Because I made Beef and Eggplant Stir-fry, and it went fine, and…I don’t know what else to say. So if you don’t want to join me on the wander, here’s a link to the recipe, and do your own thing. For everyone else: let’s dig in to my dregs.

See,What Had Happened Was

As I mentioned on Thursday, my week took a sudden and drastic turn on my birthday last Tuesday, when one of our chickens got mauled by a raccoon. Since then, she has, on vet’s orders, been receiving 4 massages a day, and taking 4 medications a day, at 3 different intervals. All told, that’s about…an extra hour and a half to 2 hours a day in stuff. (each massage is 5-10 minutes, and her morning and evening medicine round-ups take about 20-30 minutes.) Along with you know, taking her to the vet, calling the vet about appointments, etc. I ALSO got to take the cat to the vet, because their only opening was while Nate was on a hike, and she may have literally scarred me last week in reaction to trying to help her with her problems.

“Thank you, human, for lifting me to a sitting place I was too fat to jump to. In exchange, let me make you bleed by flexing my back leg as I step off of your arm .”

That would have been an irritating bit of time crunch, but it also overlapped with 2 other projects: firstly, Nate’s birthday present to me was a 400 page novel that I read 60% of Tuesday, and then finished on Friday (I knew I would drive myself crazy if I read it all Tuesday and had to wait all week to not spoil anything) AND I had a theatrical project that required me to edit a 70 page script, and write 10 pages of semi-new material. For context, each of these posts is roughly 4-5 pages long, So from my perspective, I’ve hammered out an extra 2 posts worth of writing in the last week, on top of the chicken catastrophe, cat-astrophe, and…enjoying my birthday present. (I didn’t say the week was ALL bad) Also, because I hate myself, I watched the Presidential debate. So that was another 2 hours burned up.

So when I say “I haven’t had a chance to do a TON of research on today’s post”, I just want it noted that I had some stuff going on. (On the plus side, today we’re getting the chicken looked at to see if she’s handled the first phase of healing well, so one of her medications will be dropping off. On the down side, the only time for that appointment is RIGHT WHEN THESE NORMALLY GET UPLOADED.) (editor’s note: the appointment was then delayed, which cascaded my workload through the OTHER 3 appointments I had today, which is why this went up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning instead of Monday afternoon: rest assured, I have already begun work on Thursday’s post so that ONE post in two weeks comes out on time.)

I would say “one of many ways I am not like Mussolini is that I can’t make the trains run on time”…but that’s just propaganda: the trains DIDN’T run on time under his leadership, he just SAID they did, and he wasn’t even the one who upgraded the trains!. So…I guess I’m saying “at least I don’t CLAIM I can make the trains run on time”, like Mussolini.

So, what are we making, and why? The answer to those questions are “Beef and Eggplant stir-fry, and kind of dumb reasons”. I say “kind of dumb” reasons because… look, sometimes, I get…mental hangnails or “mind slivers”. Ideas that get ‘stuck’ in the back of my mind, and…for lack of a better word, “itch” or ache: they just come back, again and again, in little moments, pushing me to do SOMETHING about them. So, back in June, I made Baba Ghanoush, probably, and it kind of reminded me that I almost never cook with eggplant, but I had this kind of built-up mental belief that it sucked. Which is weird, because I honestly couldn’t tell you if I’d ever HAD a bad eggplant dish, but like with Brussels sprouts, I just had this idea from media that it was gross and bitter. So when I bought eggplant to make the veggies for the Crab curry burger a month later, I bought a little extra, and figured I’d do SOMETHING with them. And in the two weeks it took me to find a recipe that I thought looked good, rather obviously, the eggplant went bad. Probably. It actually stayed in the fridge for like, a month and some change before I bought more eggplant to replace it. Then my schedule got screwed up, so the beef I bought went bad, as did the replacement eggplant. And at that point, I got a little stubborn. See, the eggplant and beef are the ONLY ingredients in this that aren’t pantry/fridge staples for my family. And the recipe promised to be fairly easy and quick. So I felt I was being cheated: if my schedule could just work out for ONE DAY, I could have a nice simple meal without a lot of STRESS.

I just want to eat a quarter of my body weight in fried potatoes, and shit on a statue. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?

And then it did, I made the dish… and then learned that it has no real history. As far as I can tell, it’s just kind of…an idea that no one thought special enough to take credit for: There’s a lot of Chinese dishes of minced pork and eggplant, and dishes that combine various ground meats with eggplant, plenty of stirfries that focus on one or two main components…but this specific configuration just appears to be a kind of generic idea Cook’s Country came up with a couple years ago.

That’s all I can find. And while there’s a wide array of cool things to talk about with like, stir-fries, woks, and so on…It’s not even really one of those. I assume that it’s a riff on the “MEAT AND VEG” combinations you see in various American Chinese dishes (Green Bean Chicken, Beef and Broccoli, etc), indeed, the sauce is fundamentally very close to that of a Beef and Broccoli: a mixture of soy sauce, oyster sauce, garlic, and ginger. So my best guess is that someone took the basic structure of Beef and Broccoli, and asked “can we switch out the vegetable?” and it KIND OF worked, but the texture was a little off, so they moved to ground beef instead of steak strips. And…yeah, I think that’s really all there is to say about it, so I guess we’re just going to make it.

A Little Mise, and a Couple of These

Now, the key to good stir fry is strong mise-en-place: because you cook fast over high heat, you need all your ingredients prepped beforehand. This is one of the reasons that stir-fry became the signature Chinese American restaurant dish: if you chop up a bunch of vegetables before service (or have people whose job it is to feed the constant need for chopped veg) you can crank out wokfuls of food very quickly. This is not technically a true stir-fry, since it’s going to cook mainly on medium-high heat, and there’s not going to be a lot of tossing, but it’s functionally very similar.

You will first need 1.5 pounds of eggplant, which for me, turned out to be 1.5 eggplants.

I intentionally bought the one on the far right because it was smaller, and I assumed it would be lighter, so discovering it weighed AS MUCH as the big one was shocking. Not much of a shower, that eggplant.

Cube the eggplant up into roughly 1” chunks, and it’s ready to fry. At this point, you COULD start frying, and try to prep the aromatics while the eggplant cooks for 10 minutes, and if you have a second set of hands in the kitchen, I’d definitely suggest it, but I was cooking on my own, so I…did it anyway because I’m bad at time management. (It’s actually not all that bad: the only thing that’s frustrating is that you’re supposed to stir the eggplant often, so I would chop things for a minute, walk over to stir, walk back and chop some more…it was moderately inefficient.)

After 10 Minutes on medium high, the eggplant should be “tender and browned”, which I assumed was what this was.

I’m not here to gate-keep, but if these ain’t brown, who the hell is?

Then, you toss the eggplant in a tablespoon of soy sauce, and dump onto a plate to wait as you handle the next part: Cooking the beef with some classic aromatics. We’re talking ginger, we’re talking garlic, we’re talking a finely chopped jalapeño that was supposed to be a finely SLICED red jalapeño, but the store only had green ones, and I screwed up the prep style because of the constant back-and-forth while I was prepping.

To compensate here’s a picture of the scraps of the jalapeño, which I took after I realized I tossed the jalapeño in the pan without a picture of my screw-up, so I figured I’d screw up again.
”Compensate” is that thing where two things are similar, right? People keep saying my large truck must be compensating for my penis, so I assume they’re saying my dick is huge.

That all goes in with 12 ounces of beef, or you can be like me and say “I’m not saving 4 ounces of beef”, and up the amount to a pound. After all, it’s not like increasing the water and fat content of the dish by 33% will affect the consistency or flavor of the final product! (Look, we’re not all that smart round here.)

Cook that until browned, and then sauce it up! The sauce is a mixture of two very normal ingredients (soy sauce and rice vinegar) and one that might be a little weirder for some people: Oyster sauce.

“Hey, boss, how do we ensure that people know this is a bottle of oyster sauce?”
”Put a dozen oysters on the wrapper?”

Now, to be clear: yes, there are (or SHOULD BE) oysters in your oyster sauce. Or, rather “parts of oysters”. The original recipe for oyster sauce is…for FUCK’s SAKE, China, you can’t invent EVERYTHING BY ACCIDENT. Ugh. So, SUPPOSEDLY, Lee Kum Sheung, who owned a tea stall that sold cooked oysters as a side (I just realized I probably need to do a bit of a deep-dive on the history of oysters for Thursday so we can explain the idea of ‘street cart oysters’ in a way that doesn’t sound like dysentery-to-go) was simmering oysters in a pot of water, lost track of time, and discovered that his simmering pot of oysters in clear water had become a pot of thick brown sauce. This is because the juices of oysters will, over time, breakdown and caramelize, kind of like how in barbecue connective tissue will dissolve into gelatin. The sauce was so good, Lee Kum restructured his entire business around it, and that’s why half the bottles in the Asian food section of your supermarket have his name on them.

Amazingly, 5 minutes of searching my stored Google photos says I either have NEVER taken a picture of a Lee Kum Kee label before…or I deleted them back before I started uploading to the cloud.

So oyster sauce is reduced oyster liquids that have caramelized. Mass produced versions are a little more “oyster extract mixed with a fairly standard sauce mix of cornstarch, salt, and sugar”, but the IDEA is for mildly sweet, but still salty-and-savory brown goo.

Tut tut! “Brown, WORRYINGLY GELATINOUS goo”, thank you.

It’s the backbone of a lot of thicker Chinese sauces, including beef and broccoli, and this one, so in it goes. (If you’re a vegetarian, there ARE versions of it made by browning the shit out of mushrooms for a similar flavor and texture, so you do have the option to experience something like it.)And THAT one ingredient is basically the most interesting thing happening. Once the sauces are in, you also re-add the eggplant to the pan, stir everything to combine, let cook for a couple minutes so the sauce heats through and tightens up, and then it’s time to serve.

Appetizing!
Man, those eggplant seeds really look like organs or something.

Technically, it’s supposed to be served over rice, but I was too busy chopping and stirring to also simmer, so we just ate ours straight. And it’s…fine. Nate and my mother both lauded it as a pretty good dish, while I personally felt it struggled in one frustrating regard: it was too safe. Probably because of the change in meat, it felt underseasoned to me: I couldn’t TASTE any of the jalapeño, or soy sauce, or garlic. Reading some other reviews of the recipe, it seems several others agree that THIS version of the recipe is on the mild side, and could do with a little punching-u;  I read that some people doubled the jalapeño and garlic, or added this or that to the sauce. As a first foray into a dish, and with a fairly palpable alteration, I think it’s still a passing grade, I just also think that, for ME, it definitely needs some more work before I’d call it a real ‘success’. We’re talking a C- here: technically adequate, but not what you WANT to see.

THURSDAY: OY BOY, I GUESS WE GET TO TALK ABOUT OYSTERS. GET READY FOR SOME WEIRD SHIT. WAIT. DID I ALREADY DO THIS? …NO, I WAS REMEMBERING A POST ON CLAMS. VERY DIFFERENT.

MONDAY: PROBABLY MORE BEEF, BUT MAYBE SOME PASTA, OR A NICE DESSERT. WOULDN’T THAT BE NICE?

Recipe

Chinese Style Beef and Eggplant

Serves 4

Ingredients

                Eggplant

1.5 pounds eggplant, cut into 1” cubes

3 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp soy sauce

                Beef and sauce

1 tbsp vegetable oil

12 ounces ground beef (85% lean)

1 jalapeño, seeded, stemmed, halved, and thinly SLICED

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 tbsp grated fresh ginger

2 tbsp oyster sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp unseasoned rice vinegar

4 scallions, sliced on the bias

Preparation

1. In a 12 inch non-stick skillet, heat the oil for the eggplant until just smoking over medium-high heat. Add the eggplant, and cook, stirring frequently, until tender and browned, roughly 10 minutes. Add soy sauce, toss to coat, and move to a plate while you cook the beef.

2. Wipe the same skillet clean, add the remaining tbsp. of vegetable oil and heat over medium-high until shimmering. Add the beef, jalapeño, garlic, and ginger, and cook untll browned, stirring occasionally to break up the beef, about 4 minutes.

3. Add the oyster sauce, soy sauce, and vinegar, stir to combine. Add the eggplant, and cook until combined and slightly thickened, around 2 minutes. Add half of the scallions, and stir to combine, letting cook for just 30 seconds or so, before removing from the heat, and topping with the remaining scallions. Serve over rice if desired.