… Eggplant ai ni.
For those unfortunate souls who have never had the great fortune to taste the beauty of the Chinese eggplant dish, I would recommend you drive over to Great Wall II immediately and demand they whisk you up some ‘Yu Xiang Qie Zi’ ASAP. They will most likely laugh and then turn you down — not because they just don’t have it on their menu and not because the tones you just used to say that made it sound like you were ordering a “surprised-looking penguin” — but because gas stoves in the US can’t even get hot enough to cook this delectable dish the way it is done every day, in every restaurant in China. In thus lies the beauty of Chinese eggplant. While I never particularly enjoyed eggplant in the US, here the beautifully-steamed then stir-fried til it’s oh-my-lawd-so-good vegetable is a weekly staple to our Chinese cheap-eats diet in Shanghai. We discovered the beauty of this dish last year, and as an update for the Fall in China 08 crew: It’s still good.
I won’t go into more detail lest I get hungry, but my fellow eggplant-lover Stephanie has cataloged more about the beauty of ‘qie zi’ including a recipe for the brave — stephanieliu.wordpress.com.
