As Quick as Curry Gets

A while back, my Aunt Susan -- an incredible home cook, and one of the most fun kitchen companions I know -- sent me a recipe for Instant Eggplant Curry. While I don't think the eggplant stew itself is instant (one of the challenging things about eggplant is that it always takes a while to cook), her recipe instantly transforms an ordinary eggplant-tomato stew into a delicious curry.

Here's the scoop from Aunt Susan:

Thought you would like this eggplant dish I just made. It's a kind of sweet and spicy eggplant curry. The shortcut was using a couple of tablespoons of eggplant chutney to flavor it, after frying the onions, eggplant, garlic,and tomatoes. The dish went from ubiquitous eggplant in tomato sauce to spicy curry in seconds! One of my Indian friends gave me a quart jar of her daughters' mother in law's homemade tomato chutney... It's good as a condiment, but worked great as a spice paste too!

Inspired by Aunt Susan, I've also been experimenting with easy eggplant curries. While I love cooking (obviously), I'm also a chaotically busy graduate student with little time to cook during the week. I'm always looking for quick recipes that are inexpensive, satisfying, and taste good as leftovers.

While curry powder tastes OK, I've found that curry paste tends to have a richer flavor (either that, or the various spiced chutneys that can double as curry paste -- thanks, Aunt Susan!). In the foreign foods aisle of most groceries, you can find Indian curry paste in a jar, which usually has the same ingredients I might use if I made a similar paste from scratch.

Here's an easy eggplant-chickpea-tomato curry that I made from one of these commercial pastes:

Ta-da! Total cooking time: 30 minutes. Number of meals: 6. Cost of ingredients: $8.

Ingredients:
1 large eggplant
1 can diced or crushed tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
1/2 can coconut milk
1/2 onion, sliced
1/2 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
generous scoop of curry paste (adjust quantity to taste)
fresh cilantro

Steps:
Wash the eggplant, cut in half, coat each half in olive oil, and roast in the oven until eggplant is soft (350 degrees, around 20-25 minutes). Remove the skin from the roasted eggplant and roughly chop/mash.

Sautee the onions and ginger in olive oil, along with whole cumin seeds. Add the curry paste to the oil and sautee very briefly (burns quickly!). Add tomatoes and drained/rinsed chickpeas, along with a splash of water or broth. Simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the cooked eggplant and continue to simmer for a few additional minutes until the flavors have soaked in and some of the water has boiled off. Taste the mixture and add salt if necessary.

Turn off the heat and add the coconut milk when the curry has cooled slightly. (If you boil coconut milk, it tends to separate, so always add it after the curry is finished cooking.) Do a final taste check and add any necessary salt. Top with fresh cilantro and serve with bread or over rice.

The finished curry in the pan.

I guess it doesn't look that appealing... but tastes delicious!