Get your mind out of the gutter! I'm talking about eggplant! Or rather, an unfortunate encounter with the remants of my fridge.
Arriving home one night, starving, slightly inebriated from a post-work celebration, I decided to cook some eggplant. Mind you, I love eggplant, and have made eggplant converts out of the most adamant of foes (see "Eggplant Faux-Baba"). But tonight was a Fail with a capital F -- worthy of the eponymous blog.
It all started with an open bottle of beer in the fridge. Not mine -- well, I bought the beer -- but a less than courteous houseguest who thought that fruit flies wouldn't proliferate in the cold. Well, news flash, they do. But being ridiculously frugal, I thought, "Hey, why not try to cook with it?" Images of beer-steamed grilled corn and beer-battered fish and beer-molasses baked beans danced in a slightly blurry way before my eyes. For some reason I had the idea that the English do some weird stew with meat, cheese and beer (which they probably do, by golly, but I haven't the faintest idear of the receipt). Sub in eggplant for meat, add some garlic, pour the beer over the browning eggplant and let it simmer until the eggplant is cooked.
Herein lies the rub: that wonderful Japanese eggplant I swoon over cooks really quickly. And beer evaporates slowly. And melting Rogue Creamery Stout Cheddar into the mix didn't help matters. I ended up with a creamy eggplant-beer soup. That tasted like bitter eggplant, hoppy beer and sharp cheese. One of my few creations that actually tastes worse than the sum of its parts.
Let this be a lesson to you, readers! Cook not when thou hast imbibed. Thou shalt regret it much earlier than morning.
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