One dish we regularly cook at home is stuffed eggplant. Tortang talong, as we call it in Tagalog, has the singular merit of being both a vegetable and meat dish, thus containing most of the nutrients required for a complete meal.
However, it calls for the separate step of grilling and peeling the eggplant, apart from cooking the ground pork separately, then encapsulating the pork in the eggplant with the help of beaten eggs and perhaps a sprinkling of flour. Afterward, the whole thing has to be fried in hot oil. For a dish that’s supposed to be simple, this can get rather tricky.
Recently, while watching YouTube, I came upon an eggplant dish made by Thai chef Pailin Chongchitnant in her website Hot Thai Kitchen (or Pai’s Kitchen). As with many Thai dishes, it was made spicy with the use of chili paste and a whole long chili pounded to a paste with garlic. But it looked very doable and delicious, without the need for grilling the eggplant separately.
I wasted no time trying the recipe—and putting my own spin on it. I made the dish less spicy and added one of my own favorite vegetables—okra. My husband liked it, and hence it’s now part of my arsenal of recipes at home.
One of the ingredients used by Pai is Thai chili paste. On one of my very infrequent trips to the supermarket, I couldn’t find it. I tried the online shops, and luckily I found bottled Thai chili paste in Shopee. I quickly ordered it and within a few days, it was delivered right to our doorstep.
Here’s the easy eggplant and okra recipe, inspired by Pai’s Kitchen.
Eggplant and Okra with Ground Pork
For the sauce:
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp patis2 tsp oyster sauce
2 Tbsp bottled Thai chili paste
1 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp water
For the garlic-chili paste:
1 whole long chili (siling haba)
3 cloves garlic
For the vegetables and pork:
2 Tbsp cooking oil
1 long eggplant, sliced diagonally into half-inch thick pieces10 okra, trimmed and cut into halves
¼ kg ground pork
10 basil leaves
Make the sauce: In a bowl combine the soy sauce, patis, oyster sauce, Thai chili paste, sugar and water. Set aside.
Make the garlic-chili paste: For a less spicy dish, slit the long chili lengthwise in the middle and remove and discard the seeds. (Do not remove the seeds if you want a spicy dish.) Pound the chili and the garlic in a mortar and pestle until paste-like. Set aside.
Cook the vegetables and pork: Heat the cooking oil in a wok and sauté the eggplants until slightly softened. Remove from the wok. Do the same with the okra and remove from the wok.
Add the prepared garlic-chili paste to the wok. Stir in the ground pork and cook until evenly browned and no longer raw. Return the eggplants and okra to the wok and pour in the prepared sauce. Toss in the basil leaves. Stir-cook until the basil leaves are slightly wilted. Serve warm. Makes three to four servings.