Guest Recipe Share: Eggplant Masala

***Below is a guest post from Sandi, our culinary & cultural explorer-abroad in India***

So, I like eggplant when I’m in the States.  But when I wanted to get an eggplant here in India, I was shocked.  They’re everywhere… little Italian ones, striped, huge bulbous rich purple ones...  I am in eggplant heaven… and I was inspired to figure out how eggplants work in the Indian diet.

I’m lucky enough to have a job where a young woman, Renuka, comes in and helps me out at home (cause I don’t speak but a few words of Hindi, and those in my neighborhood don’t speak but a few words of English).  So I bought a lovely, fresh, farm direct eggplant and I held it up for Renuka.  She inspected it and smiled.  “Ban-ghel masala?  Yes.  Ban-ghel masala,” she said.

Then she did this:

1.Roast the eggplant: Cut the large eggplant in half and slice the insides crossways deeply, without cutting the skin.  Sprinkle with salt (being sure to get salt down into the cuts) and let it sit for 30 minutes.  Squeeze the excess water out gently.  Brush with olive oil.  Put some fresh cilantro on a pan and put the eggplant face down on top of it.  Put the pan in the oven for about an hour at 400 degrees.  Allow to cool just slightly and spoon meat out of the eggplant skin.  Set aside.

2.Chop up green peppers, tomatoes, tiny hot peppers, cilantro and garlic to your taste.  Heat oil in a pan and saute the hot peppers in the oil.  You can leave them in if you like it hot…but take them out (just flavoring the oil) if you just like a little heat.  Then add some garam masala or curry to the oil and stir until it smells awesome.  Saute the chopped veg in the oil until soft, then add the eggplant and saute until blended and heated through.

It’s a squishy mess, but wow… the eggplant is cooling and light and the hot of the pepper is refreshing.  I usually eat it with roti, but I’m going to try it with basmati rice next time.

-Sandi

Living With Binge Eating Disorder

I’m absolutely crazy about these candies that come out around Easter called Robin Eggs.  They’re basically a Whopper malted milk candy coated in a layer of chocolate, then coated again with a hard, sugar layer on top.

One serving is 8 candies, and there are 180 calories in a serving.  There are seven servings in a bag so the bag contains a total of 1,260 calories (a day’s worth).

I am completely capable of polishing off the entire bag in one sitting.  Feel free to gasp in horror, but that’s the ugly and occasionally shocking reality of binge eating disorder.

I love these candies and don’t want to live the rest of my life without ever enjoying them, but I also don’t want to hurt my physical and mental health by binging on them and I know that if I buy them and put them on the shelf with my other snacks eventually I will do just that.  If I’m lucky I’ll manage to eat them in two sittings instead of one, but that’s still not an acceptable amount of empty sugar calories to consume in one day.

So here’s the coping method:

I bought the bag when I was not hungry, brought it home, opened it up and immediately divided it into seven appropriate serving sizes.  There were four candies left over so I had to even them off (yum).

I placed a single serving into my cupboard, and Ted hid the rest away somewhere in the house.  When I want a serving, I need to ask him to bring me one.  It’s up to me when I would like a serving, but dividing them up and hiding them cuts off my ability to turn them into a binge.

Obviously this method is tricky if you live alone, but if you have a good friend who lives close by or a neighbor you trust who are willing to help out, that would work too.

I will always have an eating disorder, but I want to be a person living the rest of my life in recovery from it rather than being a slave to it.  Balancing things I enjoy into my life in a way that I can live with isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.