Last Friday afternoon as a storm was approaching, Yo Lim declared his hunger. “I’m hungry”, he whined. “Let’s go get something to eat”. As much as I would have loved to run out and grabbed a burger at Dumont or something like that a nagging voice in the back of my head was reminding me of all the vegetables in the fridge and all the veggies we would be picking up on Saturday. “How ’bout we go to the grocery store, stock up for the weekend, and get some meat?” I offered as a compromise. (Yo, in true Texan style, is easily bribed with meat.) With the prospect of a meaty meal on the horizon, Yo happily agreed to head to the grocery store.
We have been raging Italian cooks lately due to an abundance of heirloom tomatoes; we subscribe to two vegetable shares and an additional tomato share which nets us an average of 10 or 11 pounds of tomatoes a week. This day we were craving something different which had led us to think we wanted to eat out…However, one simple cruise of the grocery store and we were newly inspired. In the aisles of Tops, the closest grocery store to my house, Yo found some organic steak cubes and some spicy Japanese curry roux that had his name written all over it. [ Japanese curry is nearly always prepared by using a commercial curry roux and in fact I have yet to find a decent recipe for making your own. Curry roux can be found in any Japanese shop and are largely indistinguishable. Tops carries the popular brand Golden Curry which we find delightful.]
A short time later he was in the kitchen “chopping up every vegetable” he could find in true csa member style. Eggplant, green peppers, onions, green beans, and of course some tomatoes found their way into the rich curry base. Organic steak was the special extra. We busted out my roommate Zoe’s rice cooker from where it had been mothballed under the counter making a permanent space for it up top. Half an hour after arriving home we were dining finely on some of the best eggplant curry around. It would have been easy just to order up some lunch/dinner, but we were certainly glad that we took the extra step to cook that meal.
Eggplant Curry, Yo Lim style
