Oil N’ Eggplant

Oil N’ Eggplant
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

I have been holding out for an “Oil N’ Okra” shot but that will come later, today was Oil N’ Eggplant day garnished with a bit of tomato. While I am not a fan of eggplant there are palatable ways in which it can be fixed, alittle in a spaghetti sauce or chili works nicely, eggplant parmesan is quasi-edible, and musaka (the eggplant & meat casserole version) is one of my favorites, but Oil garnished with alittle eggplant (ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration) is not at the top of my favorite dishes list.

I have come to the conclusion that many Eurasian dishes are perhaps a bit more oily than I normally prefer (case in point, I later drained the oil off into one cup and the food part into another cup and found that oil was about 1/6th of the entire dish [perhaps more but that is all I could drain off]). This was an issue in Eastern Europe but I don’t remember excessive (to this degree at least) oil usage in Kenya or Southeast Asia. While this is waaaay too much oil for me (in terms of personal taste and considering the semi-sedentary lifestyle that working in Afghanistan imposes on one) I have noticed that if there is less oil then people do not seem to like the food as much.

Having grown up in the Southeastern US, the land of fatback and overcooked vegetables, I have come to the conclusion that excessive use of oil/fat, salt/msg, sugar, etc are means of culinary compensation for poor cooking. That is not to say those that who use excessive amounts of the afore mentioned ingredients are thinking “well its bad food but I’ll just add a few cups more of oil to make up for it” but just that they have just learned that this way of cooking is good enough. I am no master chef but I consider myself to be a decent cook and I have cooked food in areas where inordinate amounts of oil in food is the norm and have been complimented on most of the foods (where I used a small fraction of the oil normally used, or none at all); I say most because I have learned the hard way that no matter how well they are prepared there are some foods that some societies typically will not eat like Spicy stuff in Moldova or vegetables in Afghanistan (this is more true in the rural areas than the larger cities).