5 EXCITING WAYS TO EAT MORE VEGETABLES!

[Music] silky soft chunks of eggplant in a sauce that's like a full-on umami bomb and then a little bit of beautiful chili oil at the end ah this is one eggplant dish you are going to want to master at home all right so i'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is quite possibly the best eggplant dish that i know how to make i love this one wait till you taste the flavor and the texture of the eggplant is amazing and we don't have to do any of that deep frying business that you have to do with a lot of eggplant recipes so let's get on with it i'm going to start off with these eggplants here now let's talk about the eggplant for a minute because i've got these ones that are about palm size the really big ones i tend to find that you will have more of a risk of a bitter eggplant so i try to find the smaller ones if you can and i want to take the tops off these and cut them in half and then i like to have wedges here and you can keep them quite chunky because they will soften up so much and i do want to keep some of their shape at the end okay so this next step is another precaution that we're going to take to make sure that we don't have a bit of eggplant flavor so i like to just sprinkle these with some salt [Music] and then just pop them into a colander and let the salt do its magic for about 30 minutes so in the meantime i'm going to make a braising liquid for our eggplant we're going to start off with some miso paste this is just a white miso also called shiro miso and some soy sauce some vinegar some stock so i'm using beef stock because i want to give it like a bit of a meaty oomph but you can use vegetable stock as well just to keep it vegetarian and some sugar now just scoop off all of that miso we don't want to miss out on any of that flavor that's where the umami flavour's going to come from for our sauce and now i want some aromatics i'm going to go in with some ginger [Music] [Applause] and some garlic okay so if we have a look at our eggplant now you can see we've got some liquid that's come out of there and hopefully some of that salt has absorbed into the eggplant as well so salt always for any kind of application will diminish a bit of flavor you would think it would be sugar wouldn't you but it's actually salt so there you go more food nerdiness for you guys um now tip this out onto a tray lined with some paper towel and i just want to cover these and really give them a good squeeze get rid of any of that extra liquid in there so with a lot of eggplant recipes whether it's chinese or italian a lot of the time they start out by deep frying the eggplant and you could go ahead and do that here as well i just prefer when i'm doing this dish just to keep it a little bit more simple just use a little bit of oil and i'll show you my technique for making sure they get a little bit of color and soften up a bit now i'm going to add in my eggplant pieces it's kind of like a little bit of a puzzle i want to fit as many as i can into this dish and just let these pieces go for a couple of minutes until we get a little bit of color happening on that side there and then when i've got a little bit of a light tan golden color here i'm going to flip them over wait for some color on that second side and now i'm going to pile these up into a corner and then add in a few more pieces now the reason we're doing it this way is that i do want to keep everything nice and snug in here for when i add my liquid because i want it all to braise i want the liquid not to burn if there's not enough liquid in a wider pan it would burn because of the sugars and the miso paste so there is method to the madness and just make sure those ones that you've piled up you're just kind of turning them over getting some lovely color now okay so at this point i've got a pan here that is chock full of eggplant got some that have got a bit of color on them and now i'm gonna pour in my sauce [Music] the smell of that ginger and the garlic is amazing now just pop a lid on that and reduce the heat down and let that simmer for 10 minutes so while that's happening i'll just slice some spring onion now i just have to wait patiently for that eggplant which is already smelling amazing so let's have a look that eggplant is really nice and beautifully silky soft what i want to do now is thicken up that sauce a little bit so i'm going to add some corn flour just mix with a little bit of water mix that through now just pile that out onto a plate and don't leave behind any of that amazing sauce and now here's a little optional extra but i love to drizzle this with my homemade chili oil it's got loads of spices in here you guys have told me how much you love it so i know a lot of you have made it there's a recipe this on my youtube channel so i'm just gonna drizzle that over the top and just a little sprinkling of spring onion [Music] ah i get so excited about this one silky soft eggplant and that beautiful sauce oh and then the spicy chili oil love that oh i tell you what even your staunch meat eater friends are gonna love this one classic thai stir-fried greens classic chinese steamed greens these are my ultimate asian greens thai pak bong phaidang and chinese steamed garlic broccoli asian greens all right i'm going to run you through two of my favorite ways to prepare asian greens and they're totally different very different different kinds of vegetables different kind of cooking methods but both very easy and will result in super tasty asian greens all right let's get started on the chinese version first now i'm using chinese broccoli here so let's let's talk about chinese broccoli it's also known as chinese kale also known as gailan also known as anything else i'm not sure i'm sure someone will tell me in the comments if it's known as anything else now take a look here it has a fairly thick stem down the bottom here and then goes up into some dark greens up here now you're looking for a vegetable that has nice green leaves without any yellow bits if you see some yellow it means it's probably a little old and some nice fresh light green stems all right so that's your chinese broccoli now over here i have some thai pak bong now also known as morning glory also known as kung kong also known as water spinach oh i thought of one more name for the chinese broccoli in thailand we call it kanat so there you go another name anyway back to the water spinach or hong kong or morning glory this is what this one looks like really thin kind of leaves and if you grab a hold of this one and the chinese broccoli and we have a look over here you can see the main difference here is the leaves and the stems and if you have a look at the thai green vegetable here it's got a hollow stem down the bottom now you can give either of the cooking methods i'm going to show you a go with things like bok choy pak choy even broccolini if you can't get chinese broccoli don't feel constrained by the types of asian greens i'm using because both of these recipes are really worth giving a go now let's prepare our chinese broccoli first of all now to get the very best out of this vegetable i like to go a little extra step with the preparation it doesn't take that much longer and it results in really beautiful tender sweet stems so have a look at the stem here usually it's quite dry on the end here so i like to just chop that off and then what you want to do is separate the leafy part from the stem so cut here and i generally cut the leaves in half again if they're quite large and now the stems themselves i like to take off some of these branches and then i find that a lot of the time the outside part of this stem is a little bitter and a little tough so i like to just slide my knife along and kind of peel it and you can see you get to like a really pale beautiful almost white center here and that is really nice and sweet and lovely now there is an easier way to do this if you would like you can use a vegetable peeler too sometimes with these smaller ones you don't have to but just give them a couple of goings over with the vegetable peeler now before we get to cooking the greens i'm going to make some garlic oil so just add some oil into a saucepan add in some very finely chopped garlic now you want to keep your eye on this garlic it will burn on you in like a second if you walk away so don't be checking like instagram and stuff at this point just stick with the garlic wait for it to sizzle and now the key here is to take this garlic and the oil off the heat before the garlic chips turn all the way brown because they will continue cooking as they kind of come off the heat now i've got a nice blonde color here i'm going to pull those off and just strain off the oil i want to keep that crunchy garlic i'm just going to drain it on some paper towel now i'm going to use the crispy garlic a little bit later on to finish off our dish first of all let's make some use of that garlic oil and make a little sauce so i just need a little bit of oyster sauce first of all and some soy sauce sesame oil some sugar a couple of spoonfuls of that garlic oil and then i want a little bit of water to kind of thin the sauce out a bit and i've got some boiling here ready for my green so i'm going to scoop out some of that hot water just helps to dissolve the sugar and get everything mixed up nicely okay all the bits and pieces done now it's just time for the greens now once rapidly boiling water i'm going to add a dash of salt here it's all these little additions like the salt in the water peeling your broccoli stems just a couple of extra steps that make your home cooking extra special now i want my stems to go in first because they're going to take longer once they've had about three or so minutes i'm going to throw in my leaves and now the leaves themselves only take a couple of minutes so we're looking pretty good here they're looking nice and dark slightly wilted stems are looking fresh and bright green so i'm going to take everything out and i like to spread my leaves and stems out on my plate because that way they all get a bit of sauce and a bit of garlic at the end now while they're still nice and warm you want to drizzle them with that beautiful sauce we made and sprinkle them with some of that crispy garlic and there you go a really simple dish but with a couple of little extra techniques really special all right let's get on to the thai version next now preparing the thai pak boom vegetable is a lot quicker and easier we just grab a bunch and rip just sort of little bite size pieces here and this is one of those vegetables that wilts down into like nothing so you'll start off with a big mound but we'll end up with just the right plate full now i want quite a bit of garlic here and one of the things i find interesting about both of these dishes is there's a lot of similar ingredients so the vegetable the garlic the oyster sauce but the way that you treat them is very different so the garlic here i just want to take the skins off leave those whole for the minute i want a couple of chilies just take the ends off and then you could just roughly chop these but for the right texture in my mind it needs to be done with a mortar and pestle so garlic cloves go in chili's i'll just tear up into there now i want a light bruising here only so see what i mean very rough and i'm just going to pop that right on top of my vegetable and now this should all happen very quickly and at a very high heat in fact if you have traveled in thailand and you've seen this being made on the streets you see a huge amount of flame and it's all very exciting um we're not going to burn my eyebrows off or set the alarm off so we won't get a huge amount of flame and smoke here but i do want you to get your wok or your pan as hot as possible now i'm waiting for this to kind of get scary hot where we see some smoke and the whole point is that this vegetable cooks really quickly and i want to make sure that we get some of that like smoke flavor and some of the charriness happening really quickly you can see the smoke now add in the oil a whole lot goes in at once now quickly add in your sauces oyster sauce fish sauce and a little dash of sugar always you should be coughing that means you're doing it right now the trick i think to this dish is that you keep it quite dry in the wok you'll see there's not a lot of sauce happening in the bottom of the rock here but what will happen is once you put it onto the plate veggies kind of keep steaming away and they form a little bit of a pool of sauce in the bottom you can see what i mean yeah it's gonna be a good one so literally a few seconds and we're ready to go all right so see how we're getting a lot more of that source now appearing at the bottom underneath those thai vegetables it's just what we want and my beautiful chinese vegetables looking so lovely with a beautiful golden garlic on the top love that these are the kinds of dishes that actually make you want to eat your greens you know going to the trouble of doing that garlic oil and having that mix of the garlic oil and sesame it was really so special in that dish and then the crunchy garlic on top yum and now of course my favorite thai vegetable nice bit of chili on there spicy garlicky salty perfect fluffy savory japanese pancakes slatted with barbecue sauce and tomato this is my version of japanese sweet potato okonomiyaki [Music] okay so pancakes for dinner that is definitely my jam and i find that these ones are great the next day in lunch boxes you can take them on picnics they are just good any time of the day really oh breakfast with eggs that's also good oh so many uses anyway let's get down to it this is okonomiyaki you might have had it in a japanese restaurant looks very difficult to make it's not really simple let's do our pancake batter first we want some plain flour [Music] and some baking powder and a decent pinch of salt here just give that a whisk now for the wet ingredients i've got some vegetable stock here some eggs and some soy sauce and we just want a smooth batter here now the thing i love about this recipe is that it's pretty much like a choose your own adventure i'm going with a vegetarian option today so i'm using sweet potato and cabbage you can easily add in some seafood or different vegetables it's really versatile if you're using sweet potato like i am just want to grate it coarsely [Music] just add that into your batter mix and then some cabbage i'm using some chinese cabbage here or nappa cabbage and you want a fair chunk of it you're going to think that this is too much cabbage and if you think it's too much then it's just the right amount and then some finely sliced spring onion and now just mix all of that together and what you're looking for here is basically like a big bowl of vegetables that seems to have just a little bit of batter holding it all together that way you know you've got the ratios right and now we're ready to cook and usually i'm all about the fast high heat because i'm doing a lot of what cooking i want the exact opposite for this one i want things to cook nice and slowly i don't want the outside to brown too quickly because i need that potato to cook all the way through so we want a nice gentle heat here some oil and a non-stick pan will definitely be your friend here and you just want to take a cup full of that mixture and scoop it out into your oil now just work fast here and use your spoon to kind of bring the edges into a nice neat circle so here how we've just got the barest whisper of a sizzle can you hear that that's what you want now just leave this guy to do its thing about two minutes on this side two or three minutes on the other side and then you should have a pancake that's beautifully golden and cooked all the way through look at that beautiful golden color such a pretty little pancake so my friend here is looking incredibly delicious ready to go now i decide to drain these on some paper towel get rid of some of that excess oil then i just leave them there sometimes i'll put them in the oven to keep warm as well while i finish off the other two now the serving up here is not just about style or plating it is totally about adding more flavor so don't skip this step i'm gonna grab your pancake pop it onto a plate and now my little condiment so i've got what i call japanese barbecue sauce which is tonkatsu sauce and some japanese mayonnaise here so just want to give yourself a beautiful drizzle of the tonketsu sauce now i am terrible at icing cakes but great at drizzling things with mayonnaise do your best with the piping here i swear it's worth it just for that so satisfying doing that kind of mayo drizzle now the other thing i have here is japanese furukake and that is a rice seasoning so it's like a little sprinkle of things like nori seaweed dry this one's got dried egg dried bonito flakes but you could just use a little bit of seaweed or even just some sesame seeds up to you now a good sprinkling of that all of these things adding little layers of flavor and then finally a little bit of spring onion and there you go japanese okonomiyaki pancakes for dinner yes now if you're going to have this for dinner you could serve it with some japanese rice on the side or a salad plenty of options there or just dig in on its own ah see what i mean about how you've got a huge amount of filling in there and just that little bit of the pancake batter that holds everything together now that is a good okonomiyaki in my book tastes really good too structurally sound and delicious just what you want out of a pancake drizzled with a spicy korean style sauce you won't be able to resist these little nuggets this is my spicy korean fried cauliflower wow these things are so addictive guys just you wait i mean i could polish off a whole plateful of my own so i would recommend making a little more than you think you need if you're going to be sharing them let's make our spicy sauce first of all i'm going to start off with some korean gochujang chili paste so this is like a fermented chili paste it adds a whack of spice and a whack of flavor i always keep some in my fridge and some tomato paste so tomato paste does two things it gives us a nice color but it also adds a savory umami flavor kind of kick-starts the flavor if you like i want some brown sugar and let's do a little bit more sweetness here some honey some soy sauce and some mirin a japanese cooking wine now this only needs a few seconds once it starts simmering it's just enough heat to dissolve the sugar in there but don't leave it unattended because it can burn really easily okay that's looking good look at that gorgeous color and that thick sticky texture just what we want there now that has a good kick of spice but not too spicy and i love that little bit of sweetness and that little saltiness from the soy perfect so now let's get on to doing our cauliflower and one of the things that you guys know by now but i hate having unnecessary mess no one wants to be cleaning up when they don't have to be so there's a particular way that i slice my cauliflower which reduces the amount of mess so i find if you concentrate on the stem part rather than cutting into the florets you don't get so much kind of cauliflower fluff everywhere so just slice through the stem and then just break open the cauliflower and keep doing that with each of these pieces slice through the stem break it open okay now i want some nice cute little florets here [Music] but just sort of wiggle your knife in here and break this into little pieces bite size pops now for the batter super simple but critical you get just the right amounts of each of these ingredients we want some plain flour that's all-purpose flour depending on where you live some corn flour also called cornstarch depending on where you live get very confusing all these different names and a little bit of baking powder just give that a mix a little pinch of salt just give that a mix and some cold water now the cold is important because the cold batter hitting the hot oil is what gives us the crispy okay so this is the kind of texture that you're looking for sort of like a crepe batter thickness now let's just test my oil temperature i like to stick in a wooden chopstick or a wooden spoon i'm just looking for those furious little bubbles which i can see and now my cauliflower goes in [Music] and now let's just drop these guys in here now frying in batches here is another crucial step if you overcrowd your pan whenever you're deep frying you're going to be reducing the temperature of the oil too much and the lower the heat of the oil the more you tend to get soggy and not crispy okay so these are looking wonderful so satisfying deep frying something until it's beautifully crispy i just drain those on some paper towel ah look at all these beauties and just check out how crispy these are i just slice into one here you can have a look perfectly cooked through the center nice and soft in there [Music] at this point i want to get my sauce ready before i polish off the whole tray of cauliflower now i'm just heating it up and it looks a little thick to me since it cooled down so i'm going to add a little bit of water you just kind of want a sticky pouring consistency here so now i just pile up my little cauliflower pops drizzle over some of that gorgeous sauce [Music] and now some sesame seeds and a little sprinkling of spring onion now there are two ways to devour these one is serve it as a party favor everyone can just pick up little bites or you can serve it with some steamed rice as a meal either way it's going to be delicious [Music] and it's like you know how cauliflower has that beautiful creaminess to it so you've got like creaminess in the center and then the crispy batter and then that spicy sauce it's all just perfect symphony sticky honey sesame sauce drizzled all over the cutest little crispy eggplant nuggets just deep fried my finger which is fine happens all the time this is my crispy honey sesame eggplant i'm always looking for ways to get my meat loving friends and family to eat more vegetables and this is one of those ways my friends because having that really crispy eggplant and that super soft inside and then that drizzle of the sticky sauce i mean no one can resist it alright so let's get going on the eggplant itself first of all now i'm going to use one of these large eggplants cut the sides off and what i want to do is create some super cute little cubes it's my preference for this one just try and make yourself a little rectangular shape here and then into some thick slabs [Music] right so you're looking for cute little cubes like that now for the salting part so this is really interesting a lot of recipes tell you to salt your eggplant to get rid of the bitter flavor but i find like modern varieties of eggplant don't tend to get that bitterness so for me this is an optional step i actually salt the eggplant here just because i like the seasoning it's good to have a little bit of seasoning on the inside of that sort of crispy nugget when you bite in and now just let that eggplant sit in that colander for just the time it takes to prepare the rest of the ingredients really and that's all you need so let's get on to doing our sticky sauce and this one is really simple i'm going to start off with some honey and some vinegar just plain old white vinegar some soy sauce and then just bring it up to a simmer i want it to bubble away to kind of infuse and meld together all those flavors for a couple of minutes and then now just to thicken everything up i'm going to add a little bit of corn flour that i've mixed with some water and just stir that through and wait a couple of minutes for the magic to happen and there you go have a look at that you almost want to return the sauce to the same thickness that the honey was when you started and look at that golden color that is one happy looking sauce now that sauce will thicken up as it cools down so if it's too thick by the time you come to pour it out just heat it up a little bit all right now before we get to the breadcrumbing process let's take a look at the breadcrumbs themselves so i love panko breadcrumbs they're a japanese style breadcrumb that's really crispy and light the problem i find is that you get such a big variation with different brands and even within one packet you can see here the crumbs range from really large to really fine now i want to get a really beautiful even fine crumb on each little eggplant nugget here so here's my tip for when you want that kind of texture i'm going to put all this into my mortar and then just grind them down to a really nice even fine powder and the other way you could do this is to pop the breadcrumbs into a ziploc bag just use a rolling pin to kind of pound them out and there you go much better much more even fine texture let's tip that out and for the rest of our crumbing process we're going with the usual suspects here i've got some flour i need some eggs [Music] now if we have a look here at the eggplant i can see that we've got kind of like a wet moist outside so i know that some of that salt has seeped into there and given us a really good flavor now i'm gonna pop a handful into the flour just toss them around now into the eggs and now mix them through the egg as well [Music] and then into the breadcrumbs [Music] all right so now we're ready to make everything nice and crispy let's check out our oil temperature i just like to stick in a wooden chopstick or a wooden spoon those of you who are long time watchers of my channel would know all about this trick okay lots of good bubbles there so we are ready to go now as always when i'm deep frying i like to tend to my little babies in here and just keep kind of tossing them and turning them over now these don't take long at all to turn beautifully golden and crispy two or three minutes is all you need and then look at that deliciousness deep frying things makes me so happy never fails [Music] [Music] and now don't take my word on the crispy just have a listen to this there's no reason to shake them at all except for i wanted you guys to hear how crispy they are that is definitely a crispy crispy little eggplant nugget we've got there okay so get these out onto a plate and now here comes the obligatory close-up drizzle shot are you ready [Music] ah look at that this sauce as well such a simple sauce and yet that tangy honey flavor so good i just finished this off with a really good sprinkling of some sesame seeds and there you go guys crispy honey sesame eggplant can't wait to dig in here so cute [Music] they're really crispy on the outside but they have this really like lush soft silky inside and then that sauce just perfect like tangy the perfect sweetness so you could serve this as like a little party nibble or a party favor or you could serve it with lots of other different chinese dishes like chinese banquet kind of thing with some rash serve with anything or just eat it straight off the plate like i am you should probably share though i mean it's a big plate but share if you want to [Music]

Channel: Marion's Kitchen

Views: 106,331

Rating: 4.9556961 out of 5

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Id: tmfyu9PtX4s

Length: 37min 21sec (2241 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021