Steamed Eggplant with meat sauce

I mentioned before that I love eggplant and I only know how to cook it a few ways but I still love to eat it. I bought 3 eggplant last weekend because I wanted to eat some and my homegrown eggplant only produced small eggplants apparently and so far it has only produced 3 small eggplant! Anyway I found out that someone else loves eggplant too and she's got some wonderful eggplant recipes that I could try. Since I had eggplant that I needed to use up I decided to try this recipe.

Recipe adapted from My Kitchen Snippets

Ingredients:

2 Japanese/Asian eggplants
1 piece chicken breast/or any type of protein – minced
2 cloves of garlic - finely chopped
2 shallots - sliced thinly
2 small red chilies (I used chili padi) – sliced thinly
1 tbsp of fermented bean paste (tau cheong)
1 tbsp of sugar
1 tsp of dark soy sauce
2 tbsp of soy sauce
½ cup of water + 1/2 tsp of cornstarch
2 spring onion – diced small

Method
1. Clean and cut the eggplant into 1” length. Season with some olive oil and salt and steam on high heat until soft.
2. While the eggplant is steaming, cook the sauce. Heat up a tablespoon olive oil in a frying pan, stir fry garlic and shallots until fragrant and lightly brown.
3. Add in the fermented bean paste, stir-fry for a few second and add in the meat and chilies. Continue to stir-fry until the meat changes color.
4. Add in all the seasoning and the water. Bring it up to boil and cook until sauce reduce and thicken. Check seasoning.
5. Pour sauce over the steamed eggplant and sprinkle the top with some spring onion. Serve warm.

I like this recipe because is so easy to prepare. Eggplant is notorious for absorbing oil when cooking and with steaming them this way you can reduce the oil that the eggplant absorbs hence when eating it doesn't taste oily when eating them. I only had a handful of ground pork so I sliced up some liver I had in the freezer that I wanted to use up. I also added more chili because I like mine spicy yummy...