Simple Eggplant Fry

I love eggplant fry when it is made from the small/baby eggplants. Personally, I feel that the big eggplants do not have as much flavor and taste. Whenever I go to the Indian grocery store, I would definitely grab some of the small eggplants and make this dish.

Ingredients (about 2 servings):

Small/baby eggplants - 1 lb cut into bite sized pieces
(Soak the cut eggplants in water so that they don't turn black)
Cooking oil - 1.5 tablespoons
Mustard seeds - 1 teaspoon
Urad dhal - 1 teaspoon
Asafoetida - a pinch
Turmeric powder - a pinch
Salt to taste

To fry in a drop of oil and grind into a coarse powder:

Channa dhal - 1.5 teaspoons
Dried red chillies - 1 or 2 (vary this to suit your taste)
Coriander seeds - 1 teaspoon

Procedure:

1. Fry channa dhal, dried red chillies and coriander seeds in a drop of oil, grind into a coarse powder and set aside.
2. In a wide pan, heat some cooking oil, pop mustard seeds, add the urad dhal, assfoetida and turmeric powder and fry until the urad dhal turns light golden brown in color.
3. To step 2, add the cut eggplant, mix the contents well, put on a lid and let it cook until the eggplant gets soft.
4. To step 3, add some salt and the spice powder mix from step 1 and keep frying until it cooks thoroughly and turns crispy and turn off the stove.

If you feel lazy to make the spice powder, you can add just a little (or more) chilli powder to step 4 or can do without any spices too. Alternately, you could even make large quantities of that spice powder and store it for later use. When I was little, my Mom and Grandma used to set aside a portion of this curry for me before adding the spice powder and I got so used to that taste that they still do it for me till date :-)

You can serve this as a side dish with rice.

I'm sending this to Sanghi's Fall in Love (FIL) - Brinjal event. Once again, I'm dedicating this to my boyfriend who learned it from me and actually makes it quite often these days :-).