Sautasia

Recently, at cooking school, I learned a slightly bad-ass way to refer to the act of thickening a sauce: "tighten that up." And since this is a natural and healthy culinary institute, rather than use cornstarch as our slurry, we use kuzu (Japanese arrowroot), which is also pretty rad. Having always been frustrated by the watery after-effect of sauteed veggies, I jumped right on the kuzu wagon and tried making something...tight.

Here is a shot of the finished product: chinese eggplant sauteed with garlic, ginger, green onion and black sesame seeds with some oil and tamari. Black sesame seeds are highly pleasing (to see and taste) on stir-fried vegetables.

By the way, that's my mint plant in there too, which I've misleadingly named Basil because it has such a nice ring to it. I'd say he's quite content living on a southern-facing windowsill in midtown Manhattan.