Ennai Kathrikaai Curry/Stuffed Brinjal Dry Curry/Yennai Kathrikaai Curry

The past 3 or 4 days has been very very tough. I have changed my Blog name Enveetu Kitchen to I Camp in my Kitchen. New name is catchy right??? Had been thinking about the change for a long time now and finally decided to go ahead with it. But man, it wasn't easy. Redirecting the old blog to my new blog was almost impossible with mine being hosted on blogger!!! loosing all Google juice,indexing and worst, what if Google spots my new blog as a copy or repeated content and slaps a block!!! ohh, worst nightmare!

Finally found a away out today morning and voila redirect works fine!! Will do a separate post on the redirect. Ok, now coming to today's post, it a delayed post, should have been up last week, but then with this Name change, i couldn't really concentrate on this.

Ennai Kathrikaai is my absolute favorite and Amma makes it in a big Kadai, almost with a 1kg of auberigine, that too small cute ones. Yes, it is better if you can fine small,evenly-sized aubergines for this. Easy to cut, stuff and cook. But then, i couldn't sieve the vegetable market for that. So, picked some even-sized brinjals, though they were a bit large in size. But, nevertheless, they tasted awesome, we had it for our Saturday lunch and it was totally yum!

Ingredients

500 grams Brinjal/Aubergine, I bought the dark purple variety

1 Medium tomato

Salt to taste (lil less than usual, coz the masala already has salt)

Fresh coriander leaves a handful for garnish

Tempering

2-3 tablespoon oil

½ teaspoon mustard seeds

¼ teaspoon hing

¼ teaspoon turmeric

2 sprigs of curry leaves

2 long variety red chili, broken (optional) or can use ½ teaspoon for red chili powder.

To Roast and grind

3 tablespoon chana dal/gram dal

3 tablespoon coriander seeds/dhaniya

4-5 nos red chilies (long variety)

¼ cup dessicated coconut

2 teaspoon white sesame seeds(optional, but hightly recommended)

½ teaspoon salt

Method

Roast the ingredients given under Roast & grind and grind it to a fine powder using your coffee grinder or the small mixer of your mixer-grinder.

Wash the brinjals in water and pat them dry. Cut the stems off and make 2 cuts on them like +. Do not cut deeper, they should be intact with a cut on top, so we can stuff the masala inside.

Once cut, stuff 2 tsps of masala powder inside the cuts and place them on a plate. There might a teaspoon of two of the masala left, we can use it in the curry or can keep it in an air-tight container for later use to flavor curries.
Now heat a wide pan, with 2 teaspoon oil given under tempering. splutter mustard seeds, add hing, curry leaves and red chilies to this.

Now add the chopped tomatoes,salt and turmeric powder to this and saute until the tomatoes become soft. Keep the flame low, we don't want to burn the curry. If using red chili powder instead of red chilies, you can add it along the turmeric powder.
Next carefully add the stuffed brinjals to this and lower the flame. Add the remaining oil on top of the brinjals, cover and cook for 8-10 minutes. Watch the flame. if you smell the curry is burning, sprinkle water on the curry.

After 10 minutes, open the cover and carefully turn the brinjals to other side, sprinkle little water and cover and cook for another 5 minutes.
After the required time, open the cover and let it be open on the stove for another 5 minutes, sprinkle little water if you smell burning or else no need. By this time, it would have cooked, skin will be wrinkled all over and little crisp here and there.
Take it off the stove, sprinkle fresh coriander on top and serve hot with Rice and rasam. It will be heaven on your lunch plate!!! 😉

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