The Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad.

So since Tuesday I've been craving this vaguely Japanese eggplant salad like crazy. I bought most of the ingredients at the supermarket on the way home, and then realised that I had forgotten the miso and tofu, so the eggplant went back in the fridge. Wednesday and Thursday I was out, and then on Friday, when I went assemble the salad, the eggplant had mysteriously vanished from the fridge. Foiled again!

By yesterday afternoon I couldn't stand it no more, and so, armed with all the neccessary ingredients, I began to cook.

The thing is, by that stage cooking the salad had become much, much more important than eating the salad. Now, for me there's a fairly simple corollary between cooking and stress. Namely, I get itchy baking fingers when something is going wrong in my life. I spent a blissful evening making a hundred cup-cakes for a party recently, and come exam time I am usually to be found in the kitchen, wreathed with steam from the oven, fingers burned, mixing batch after batch of biscuit mix, mashing bananas into a pulp for bread.

But this was the first time I have ever craved the making of an Asian salad. The baking/stress corollary is fairly straightforward, but what does it mean that I suddenly felt compelled to slice an eggplant into paper-thin slices? Why did I need to boil dried seaweed until it felt pliant and gelantinous? Why, for the love of God, was the highlight of my day seeing thick, spongy tofu become soft and slippery in its miso-and-mushroomy blanket of broth?

I don't know. I just don't know. So I made the goddamn Japanese eggplant salad, and I had three bites of it, and then I went to a friend's for dinner.

Anyway, if you ever develop this specific compulision, here is what to do:

1) Put some dried seaweed and shitake mushrooms in a pot of warm water and bring to the boil. When I did this yesterday, I added some shitake mushroom stock, but I have no idea how such an item appeared in my cupboard to begin with or where you'd go about purchasing it. It's blatantly unneccessary, anyway - just the mushrooms will do.

2) Cut a shiny purple eggplant and a few waxy potatoes into very thin slices. Cut the slices into slices. Set aside.

3) Crush a shitload of garlic with the back of a knife and dice. Chop up an onion, trying not to cry. Add half a not-too-hot chilli, also diced, and for the love of God do not touch your eyes after you've chopped it up, or then you'll really have something to cry about.

4) Saute* the garlic, onion and chilli until the onion is caramelised, and then add the eggplant and potato.

*Imagine this word with an acute accent. An accute accent that I can't figure out how to make on this computer.

5) Drain the seaweed and shitake broth into a bowl, keeping the re-hydrated seaweed and shitake mushrooms. Add in some miso, mirin, and soy, and then add it to the eggplant/potato mix with a ladle, spoonful by spoonful, as with a risotto. Keep doing this until the eggplant is mushy and the potato is just cooked through.

6) Turn down the heat and add cubes of spongy tofu. Boil up some noodles in a seperate pot - I like sesame noodles, because of the texture, but soba would work - and then drain them in the same colander as the seaweed and mushrooms. Add to the pan, toss, then let cool before transferring salad from pan to bowl and letting cool in the fridge.




Ta da! It's your free Sunday recipe/exploration of my quirks and neuroses. It's a Goddamn Japanese eggplant salad. Enjoy!