Will the Eggplant Excitement Never Stop?! or, Indian Potato and Brinjal Curry

Cubed potato, quartered Brinjals, and finely diced tomato all await MY PLEASURE

One of the first cookbooks I ever owned (in fact it might be THE first one I ever owned, that wasn’t really my Mom’s) is a book called A FAMILY HARVEST, that I bought (I believe) at a St-Lukes-On-the-Lake book sale when I was in High School. It is so totally old and out-of-print that nothing even comes up on Google for it; I could find it on my bookcase right now except I WOULD HAVE TO STAND UP.

In A FAMILY HARVEST, one of the dishes is a curry, the kind of curry made by British people in the 1880′s, then passed down in an American’s family for a few generations. I never made the dish, and who knows? it might have been good. But the thing that interested me about the recipe is that the curry is supposed to be accompanied by something called “boys” (not cooked young male humans though) which sound like a bunch of different condiments and dried fruits, and one of the “boys” is chopped up hard-boiled eggs.

The author writes about this curry as though everybody’s family eats Curry with Boys, like it is a perfectly normal thing on the family menu. It is a really nice cookbook.

Fresh cilantro, picked before COVERING THE GARDEN again

So, tonight, as I was contemplating what kind of Eggplant dish I should make with the NEXT ten Brinjals (is that even the right word?), I ran across a recipe that showed an Indian eggplant and potato curry served up with a hard-boiled egg!! Like in the Cookbook!

Sauteeing onions, mustard seed and cumin seed in coconut oil.

So I made it. First of all, it came out G*R*E*A*T and I highly recommend this curry to anyone who would like to try it. Because it is someone else’s recipe, I think the thing to do is to LINK to the website I found the recipe on, and drive traffic there. HERE is the recipe (and the photo with the egg.)

I didn’t have all the ingredients, so instead of using coconut powder, I used coconut milk; instead of using garlic ginger cilantro paste, I used fresh ginger and cilantro. What else? Oh, I used prepared red curry paste instead of red chile powder.

I used my coffee grinder to grind the poppyseeds. It was interesting, it made a kind of seed paste, like a black peanut butter. I learned in MARTHA STEWARTS COOKIE BOOK, that poppyseeds are very fast to go stale and taste rancid, so always buy small amounts when you are planning to use poppyseeds, and then use them all up.

My Dinner, served with a Hard-Boiled Egg. Then I ate a bowl of Waxed Gourds.