Lightly Battered Eggplant with Sweet and Sour Sauce [vegetarian with egg]

It frustrates me how neglected vegetables are, especially in western culture. To make the decision to become vegetarian (not that I am one) is to forfeit the joy of eating for the rest of your life. At many gatherings, hosts often neglect making a vegetarian dish or, if they do remember it, they include exactly 1 dish. If you're lucky, they will add some herbs to a random mixture of plant stuffs and roast them for you. Most often, you will just be having the most bland pasta you have ever encountered.

Perhaps Hell's Kitchen is not the best example, but, in a recent episode that I watched, the attitudes of these "chefs" really demonstrated this gaping hole in their training. They were asked to each come up with one innovative vegetarian dish, just one, and all of them swore under their breaths like it's the end of the world. In the rest of the show, vegetables were relegated to being the garnish, just blanched in water, or made into a salad. I am aware that there are some "western" vegetarian dishes out there, but the "blanched in water or make into salad" approach I'd say is a pretty accurate description of the vegetables on a typical night out. The few vegetarian restaurants tend to be pretty expensive and not that mind blowing.

Chinese cooking is a lot better at using their vegetables. You can stir fry them for one. There's tofu for another. Perhaps it is because of how difficult it was for a Chinese family in the past to get a hold of meat and so they have to be creative to get their daily nutrition and avoid having only blanched vegetables Every. Single. Day.

However, perhaps exactly because of this lack in the past, people are now going crazy with the meat. You can explain to them all you want that you are vegetarians, your host will still feel obligated to serve meat in every dish or risk being seen as "cheap." When they DO serve vegetarian (and some do, since many people are Buddhist-leaning, and Buddhist encourage vegetarianism, though I just heard on TV that not all branches of Buddhist adhere to it very strictly), it is often with a lot of oil or with tofu pretending to be every kind of meat imaginable.

Last Friday, I was looking up a restaurant in the area to try with a friend and Vegetarian Lifestyle (aka Jujube Tree 枣子树 http://www.jujubetree.com/) caught my eye. A vegetarian restaurant with 4 stars! And line ups! Fortunately, we got there early and didn't have to wait. Just looking at the menu and I was already impressed. There were so many choices! A few were "pretend to be meat" but the majority was just celebrating non-meat stuff. There were different styles of dishes, spicy, refreshing, appetizers, main course, desserts... and they were so colourful! The dishes were on average $5-8 with a few super expensive ones.

Anyway, the eggplant dish made the most impression on me in terms of taste, and thus was the inspiration for my dinner tonight :) Without further ado, here's my version of the recipe. As usual, I just randomly picked the spices on the spot without much thought. You can change it if you want.And I have absolutely no idea how much of each thing I put in.

Ingredients:
1) Eggplant
2) Flour
3) Cornstarch
4) Egg
5) Vegetable Oil
6) Seasoning (I used salt, pepper, Italian mixed herbs, hot paprika)
8) Water (maybe. Or pineapple juice if you have some)
7) Tomatoes
8) Onion
9) Vinegar (I initially put a bit of Chinese black vinegar since I got the idea for the sauce from Chinese sweet and sour pork. Then I realized that sweet and sour pork usually have pineapples, which I didn't have, but I do have apple cider vinegar, so I finished pouring the "desired amount" using apple cider vinegar instead. Apples, pineapples... the both have the word "apple," so same thing, right?)
10) Soy sauce
11) Ketchup

Steps:
1) Cut eggplants into thick slices.
2) Mix together flour, cornstarch, egg, vegetable oil, and seasoning. Then add water or pineapple juice or whatever until it becomes a batter consistency.
3) Dip your eggplants in the batter.
4) Dice tomatoes and onion. I actually almost minced the onion, but not really.
5) Heat up 2 pans. In 1 pan, add slightly more oil than usual and pan fry (or deep fry, then add a lot more oil) eggplants until batter golden and eggplants soft.
6) In other pan, add just a little oil to stir fry onions, then add tomatoes, vinegar, soy sauce, and ketchup. Taste test. After testing, I also added some more of the mixed herbs, pepper, and chilli powder for fun. Add water if your sauce is going try. I didn't need to because my tomatoes were nice and juicy.
7) Plate your eggplants first and then spread the sauce on top right before you serve to preserve some of the crispiness of batter.

Perhaps not the same taste as Jujube Tree (honestly, I don't remember what theirs taste like anymore), bu this was very yummy too :D