Chinese Eggplant! oh, wait... FAIL

After my recent trip to Lao Hunan in Chicago's Chinatown, I decided to head back there with some friends and try more items on the menu. The result was very attractive on the plate:

 ... but INEDIBLE. One of the rare occasions I've had to send something back, which felt strangely dangerous given the Mao-themed environs.

The dish was Crispy Eggplant Hunan Style, with battered and deep-fried pieces of eggplant tossed with peppers (both fresh and dried). Yet the batter was so unbelievably salty that we found ourselves cringing as we attempted to eat the stuff. As a substitute, they brought a rendition of the eggplant in plum sauce (pictured in my last Lao Hunan entry) that was tasty, but this time there was an oil slick about an inch wide pooling around the edge of the plate. This is often a problem in Chinatown, I've found -- food is too salty, too greasy, too spicy. And the Caucasian connoisseur inevitably asks his/herself: is it supposed to be that way? Do Chinese people eat it this way? AM I GOING CRAZY, OR IS IT THE WORLD AROUND ME??

In the end, we decided that people from Hunan likely have similar tastebuds and the salt-lick eggplant was probably a mistake.

Meanwhile, I bought some Chinese eggplants, unflavored seitan, and Taiwanese chili-fermented-bean paste while in Chinatown. I decided to make a stir-fry, which unfortunately was also one big FAIL. But like the above, it looked pretty:

I crafted this dish with the hypothesis that Chinese food in restaurants tastes better because it has more oil, salt, and sugar than homemade. Thus, I made a stir fry my usual way, but added considerably more salt and sugar to the sauce. Lo and behold, it tasted like my usual sub-par stir fry, only sweeter and saltier. So much for that hypothesis.

My only consolation was that the seitan itself turned out well. I soaked it overnight in the chili sauce, along with sticks of chopped ginger and large pieces of garlic. It gained a lot of flavor and softened up in the pan.

I think this dish would have turned out just fine had the sauce tasted better. The fermented bean chili paste has a weird flavor that leads me to suspect that the jar is several decades old. I deny any blame for the dish turning out crappily.

Seitan a-soakin' and eggplants a-sittin'.

 First I fried the eggplants in a bunch of vegetable oil.

Until they were cooked through and lightly browned. Still spongy in this photo.

Then I sauteed the marinated seitan.

I added onions, scallions, and peppers to the mix. I probably should have added the onions earlier, or cooked them by themselves and then added the seitan. They were a little underdone, contributing further to this dish's crappiness.
(Three Crappiness?)

I added the eggplant back in.

Then added the sauce and cooked until it looked marginally appetizing.

Well, that's it for my eggplant exploits of late. Fail and more fail. Hopefully my next entry will involve actual cooking success, as is expected on a cooking blog. Geez.