(v. 2.0) Eggplants (Chinese style) 鱼香茄子

To see v. 1.0 click here
(or it's just the post under this one) (~￣▽￣)~

Hallooooo~~

I did a cooking fail today. >v<
Yeah, it's about the eggplants. I gave them a second try today.
I wanted to because a few weeks ago, a good language partner of mine gave me an amazing site where they have all kinds of Chinese recipes (and not only Chinese, he also told me there were European recipes, even though I can't find them on the site..)
It's called Meishij. I think it's a goldmine.
For some reason, it reminds me of Recettes du Québec. I made a lot of desserts from recipes of this site when I was younger, and most of them turned out excellent.
The site is only in Chinese, but there are pictures to help you and there's always Google translate.

Anywho, I searched for some eggplants recipes on the site, and found this one.
From the pictures, it looked a lot like the ones I had in Taiwan. And the recipe seemed simple.
Actually it was more of a disaster.

I'm not even gonna describe the steps cuz I believe it was on the limit of being edible and I don't want you to do the same steps as I did (actually I just wanted to post the pictures to show my fail.)

Well, first, my dish really doesn't look like the one in the recipe. Mine looks like my mother's chop suey. I got nothing against chop suey, but.. heh. I guess I didn't use the same kind of eggplant as in the original recipe (but I've only seen one kind of eggplant here in my life, and it's the one I used).

As for the taste: quite spicy (because of the 豆瓣酱 doubanjiang) but except the spiciness, taste is very bland. First try eggplants tasted way better.

Thing is, I don't even know where in the recipe I made a mistake. >∀<

I did left the eggplant overnight on the counter because I had bought it yesterday (at about 6 pm), so maybe I should have cooked the eggplant right away when I bought it.

And I'm sorry for the ugly watermarks on my pictures. Photofiltre has not been very nice with me for a while; it doesn't want to open certain pictures. So I have to use Gimp 2 to make my watermarks, and I'm such a noob with this editor.
I'm gonna end this sad post with somewhat of a nice picture of my eggplants... doesn't look that bad here at least.

But this experience will not really keep me from trying other recipes on Meishij. So it's all good.

Eggplants (Chinese style) 鱼香茄子

Hello (and Happy New Year 2016!),

A couple of days ago, I made Chinese style eggplants. I don't really know what to call them, so let's refer to them as Chinese style eggplants in English. In Chinese, it's called 鱼香茄子 (yú xiāng qiézi). 鱼香 is like 'fish flavoured/aroma'. I didn't search on the web, but I don't really understand why there is 鱼香 in the name, maybe some people use fish sauce, I really have no idea.
The more I 'researched' on the recipe, the more I think it's a pretty flexible dish. Everyone seems to have their own style of cooking them.

The first time I ate them, it was in Taiwan. Here is a picture of the dish:

It tasted salty (but not too much), like chicken broth. It wasn't spicy at all. It was like comfort food. I ate it with rice and the broth (?) is reaaaallyyyy good with the rice. (ﾟヮﾟ)

It is only a couple of months ago that I thought of asking a Taiwanese student what was the name of this dish. She told me it was 鱼香茄子 (I call it Chinese style eggplants). She gave me a recipe she wrote herself in French on how to make them. It was so sweet.
I only tried the recipe during the Christmas holidays since I was home at that time (and I had the kitchen).

Just as I started cutting the eggplant, I discovered eggplants have seeds... (I think I ate eggplants one time in my life, and I don't recall them having seeds at that moment...)

So I checked on the internet if you needed to remove them. I was so hoping to not need to (though as you can see on the picture, I did started to try to remove the seeds by trying a fancy cut on the eggplant, but then I saw there were seeds even near the skin, so I just went to look up on the web cause I didn't want to cut all this for nothing).

And in fact, you don't need to remove them. It would have been kind of a hassle if you had, in my opinion..

Ingredients:

Basil leaves, garlic, jalapeño peppers (didn't put in the seeds thank God), 1 eggplant

Garlic and hot pepper with oil.

Adding the eggplant.

After 3 minutes of cooking/steaming (with pot cover) on medium-heat.

After adding soy sauce, sugar, water and salt.

Final result.

It definitely did not taste like the ones I had eaten in Taiwan. Nonetheless, it was good. If only I had put less jalapeño peppers. I never cook with hot peppers, but when I do...

Also, the recipe called for two eggplants, but I decided to cook just one, because it looked enough. Didn't know eggplants were like spinach and shriveled like crazy.

But because it didn't taste like the eggplants I had eaten in Taiwan, I asked another Chinese person if the dish on the (first) picture was really Chinese style eggplants. He told me yes, and that there were a lot of variations of this dish. Well, in fact, after looking up Chinese style eggplants on the net, I found that each recipe had something different from the other, but all in all, same basic ingredients.

I will of course try other recipes of these eggplants until I find ze one.

See ya :)