Thursday, September 30, 2010

steamed eggplant and mushrooms with peanut sauce

Steamed Eggplant and Mushrooms with Peanut Sauce is a recipe I'd never have wanted to try if not cooking through Everyday Food. This was my first time buying Chinese eggplant and I found myself buying MORE shiitake mushrooms for this recipe. Guess what?! I think my depletion of Fresh Co.'s supply encouraged them to realign their mushroom stash! They now offer shiitakes prepackaged (as before) but also loose in bulk. The loose bulk mushrooms were very fresh and in great shape, so I did something I really should not admit - I removed the caps from the stems in the grocery store and only took the caps! This is so frugal of me, I'm so embarrassed, but I only wanted to pay for what I use (charging $12/lb). I feel bad leaving all these stems in amongst the produce. Don't do as I did - it's bad!

Doesn't this dinner look disgu... um... unappetizing? However, it was actually pretty good! Nuno loved it and I thought it wasn't too bad. We both agreed the peanut sauce was great. What made us both really excited was that this peanut sauce seems to have cracked the recipe for our favourite Thai dinner, Panang Curry. I think if I used the base of this sauce and added Thai red curry paste we'd be set. I'm going to give it a shot sometime soon and I'll blog about how it went.

Making a dinner for Owen from this recipe wasn't easy. I ended up making a Tilapia Baba Ghanoush with the steamed eggplant, greek yogurt, lemon & garlic. Owen enjoyed it.

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