rant: the cooking triangle - aesthetics, taste, convenience
seriously, it seems nearly impossible to get all three perfected in one dish.
my workload has severely ramped up, which means that more of my time in the kitchen is sacrificed by memorizing part of the human body for my biology class and organic chemistry mechanisms. however, this does not stop me from at least attempting to make time to meal prep for the future, and on this particular day, i decided to make one of my childhood favorites: chinese eggplant with garlic sauce.
i’ve made this dish before, except with premade eggplant sauce. since there are no asian supermarkets that carry said premade sauce in santa barbara, i attempted to make the sauce myself, using the measurements included in the recipe (and proportionally duplicated).
the most time consuming part of this was soaking the eggplants in salt water in order to extract out the moisture, which was roughly 15 minutes, enough for me to dice the garlic and green onions. since i like my dishes to have a thicker sauce to be paired with rice, i also made a cornstarch slurry with soy sauce, as stated in the recipe, but added my own extra ingredients in there (mistake #1: will clarify later on).
easy ingredients, easy recipe right? surely nothing could go wrong…
wrong. when the the ingredients hit the pan, disaster struck.
from the get go, the dish doesn’t look as pleasant as one would expect. possibly due to the fact that eggplant itself is not a great looking vegetable, or the soy sauce cornstarch slurry made everything turn into brown mush, but it just doesn’t look appealing, no matter how many green onions i add to it.
now, here’s where the real mess up begins. because i had adjustments to the soy sauce cornstarch slurry, the overall dish was severely imbalanced, flavor wise. for one, the ratio of soy sauce to everything else was off, meaning that the dish was horrendously salty. i had continuously added water to the sauce hoping to thin it out, but there was too much cornstarch that had only made it thicker. mistake #2.
and the worst part of all, an issue that i didn’t even expect because it seems nearly impossible for when a dish has been cooking on the stove for so long: the eggplants were undercooked. i spent so much time trying to thin out the sauce, cooking it on high heat, continuously adding water, only for the eggplants to still be undercooked.
at this point, it’s an honor to mess up intentionally overcooking a dish. i couldn’t even fulfill two of the categories of the food triangle (aesthetics, taste), and i could also argue that had i not messed up the ratio of the cornstarch slurry, it also inconvenienced me.
a childhood dish that would’ve taken half an hour consumed more time than i had hoped, with the result turning out mediocre and looking like mush on a plate. i did my best to chow it down with some rice, but at that point nothing could really save it.
aesthetics, taste and convenience can never truly live in harmony, folks. (unless you’re an accredited chef, then good for you.)