I love eggplant but don’t always want all the calories that go with eating it. It’s a vegetable that’s often times cooked into rich foods, fried in oil or simmered in rich sauces. Even when I grill whole ones, either for Vietnamese eggplant with scallions or Indian bhaigan bharta, there’s some oil involved to enhance the vegetables plush qualities.
Giving into all the fatty eggplant pleasures -- deep-fried eggplant tempura, stir-fried eggplant in garlic sauce, baked eggplant parmesan -- seems inevitable. A low-calorie eggplant dish? Nah!
Never would have I thought of boiling eggplant. That sounded nasty when a Hmong farmer suggested it to me. It’s a common way for us to prepare eggplant, John Xiong assured me. He harvested some Chinese eggplant from his Fresno field and we went back to his home to prepare this dish, among others that hot afternoon in 2006.
The Hmong eggplant mash (called lws kubtshis tuav, don’t ask me for a pronunciation!) was enlightening. John and his wife, Bee, boiled their eggplants whole so they would not get water logged. When soft, they peeled them, then mixed the flesh into a fiery chile, scallion, and cilantro mixture that had just been pounded in their mortar.
The result was full of heat and herbal pungency. It was great scooped from the mortar onto balls of steamed sticky rice, but John said that it was rather lean. If you want to take it another step, he revealed, cooking it with some oil and add extra scallion. He did and it was richer tasting.









