I picked a couple of eggplants on my picking walk, and there were at least another three or four needing to be picked this week. And I already have a whole batch of eggplant pickle in the fridge, and a big jar of marinated eggplants, tromboncino and capsicum for mezze and sandwiches. It had to be eggplant for dinner.
I was thinking Malay sweet and spicy stir fry but then we were invited to a beach barbeque. I had the “sweet and spicy” though, stuck in my head like an earworm. I started off on a Malay tangent, then drifted, I’m not sure where, perhaps back towards Sri Lanka? But these barbeque skewers turned out so well that I had to write out the recipe even if just to remember it myself, for next eggplant glut, next week.
The Recipe:
Make the marinade first, because cut eggplant will oxidise and go brown pretty quickly after it’s cut if it’s not coated. If you are doing it the other way round, toss the chopped eggplant in oil, or put it in salty water to stop it discolouring while you make the marinade (I drizzled the skewers in oil while I made the marinade).
Into a stick blender jug or a blender or food processor:
- a good slurp of olive oil – eggplant needs a bit of oil, so don’t go too easy on it – maybe a third of a cup
- juice of a lime
- a small salad onion or shallot onion, just peeled and quartered
- garlic – I used just one clove of giant Russian, but use your own judgement 🙂
- ginger – I always think ginger and garlic need to balance each other, so about the same amount. I used about a thumb sized piece of ginger
- golden syrup or brown sugar – I used a teaspoonful initially but when I tasted the marinade I added another teaspoon full
- soy sauce – I used a tablespoonful
This is the base. Taste this mix and adjust to your liking. You may like it sweeter, or more salty (more soy sauce) or more acid (more lime juice). Or, you may think it needs more heat -add a chili or a bit of chili powder or sauce.
From there I added aromatics. I used:
- fresh thyme leaves (or dried thyme if necessary)
- pepper – I used white pepper
- cinnamon – good teaspoonful
- sweet paprika – good teaspoonful
- nutmeg – slightly smaller teaspoonful
Eggplant is all about texture, and it can absorb flavours so don’t be too scared to add spices. You could substitute allspice, or Chinese Five Spice or Creole spice mix or Moroccan Ras-el-Hanout or Jerk spice mix – they all have a different flavour profile but they’d all work.
Chop the eggplant into cubes. You want every cube to have skin, so you may need to reserve the centre pieces for another recipe, and you want the pieces to sit more or less flat on the barbeque plate, so you may need to trim off pointy bits and reserve them too. I used two medium sized eggplants for this lot and I ended up with a small takeaway container of extra bits (tossed in oil) in the fridge.
Thread the eggplant cubes onto skewers, piercing each through the skin (this stops them falling apart on the barbeque). Avoid crowding them up too much.
Pour the marinade over the eggplant skewers and turn them to coat. Leave them to absorb the flavours as long as you can, even half an hour helps.
Cook on a well oiled BBQ plate, turning frequently. Don’t cook too fast. Eggplant takes a little while to cook through to that silky texture that makes it delicious. The sugar in the marinade will burn and create little blackened bits, which I like, but you might have to manage the heat to stop it happening too much.
We cooked these at the beach BBQ area, and ate them with corn on the cob also cooked on the BBQ, green bean and tomato salad, guacamole and flatbread. I took this picture a bit too early. I cooked them another few minutes, on a lower heat, till they really softened.
And then watched the full moon rise over the ocean.
