Some warm easy-going food in winter

When it’s –10 degrees and the heater just doesn’t want to play ball, the next best thing to warm you up is hot food. If you don’t have that, hot water helps too.

Here’s a dish I like to cook, in industrial-sized quantities. Why cook for 1 meal when you can cook for 5? Because no one wants to eat the same stuff 5 days straight, that’s why.

Tough.

I cooked 5 aubergines (eggplant, brinjal) with pork on Sunday, and was still eating it come Thursday. If I’d eaten reasonable portions instead of stuffing myself till the sofa was creaking, it would have gone on till Saturday of the next month.

To cook for 10 diners or more, here’s the recipe.

5 aubergines (about foot-long each, like a Subway sandwich)
2 packs of minced pork (500 grams each pack? Who knows)
Yellow bean paste (like black bean but not)
Oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce, sugar, the typical seasoning ingredients

Method to the process:

1. Cut the aubergine into batons, and put them on kitchen towels to dry slightly. When all the aubergines have been cut, they’ll probably take up space in your kitchen and perhaps parts of the couch also.
2. Heat some oil in the frying pan, and fry the aubergine on medium heat until all the aubergine pieces are soft. This process takes a good while since you can’t put too much aubergine in at once, otherwise they just sit there as though they’re at a carnival, refusing to be cooked.
3. Put all the fried aubergine onto plates and couch if necessary.
4. Heat some more oil, and fry the minced pork until cooked. When that is cooked, add in the yellow bean paste (amount varies based on how much aubergine and pork there are) and stir till the pork is cooked. Add oyster sauce, fish sauce, soy sauce and sugar to taste). At this point, your kitchen might smell like a fish-dehydrating factory.
5. Put the aubergine back in the pan, and stir the mixture together, simmer for about 5 minutes on low heat until piping hot.

If this recipe doesn’t work out, and I don’t see why it won’t, resort to this.

Store-bought mozzarella Pizza Ristorante, with a pack of frozen pepperoni thrown on top. Looks almost as tasty as the Domino’s Meteor pizza here.

Kiwi and grapes if the pizza doesn’t work out either.