I’m not a huge fan of eggplants to be honest. I don’t HATE it, but it doesn’t exactly excite me. However, I have had eggplant dishes that made me go, “Hey, this isn’t so bad!” One of those dishes is Tortang Talong (Eggplant Omelette), which is kind of like.. well, I have no other more appropriate description for it aside from ‘eggplant pancake.’ It sounds weird, but trust me, it’s good! I wanted to incorporate veggies in our meals so I decided to make this dish. However, because my husband is one of those people who can’t eat JUST veggies on their own and needs meat in his diet, I added ground pork (or ‘giniling‘) in this recipe. ‘Giling‘ in Filipino means ‘to grind.’ It has two contexts:
(1) To grind or mill, as in with meats
(2) To gyrate (here’s an example)
Sorry, that info’s probably not really relevant to this recipe, but I just thought I’d explain it anyway for those who don’t understand Tagalog, just like my husband.
Ingredients:
- 5-6 eggplants
- Ground Pork
- 3 eggs
- 2 tomatoes, chopped
- 1 onion, chopped
- 5 garlic cloves, minced
- salt
- pepper
- cooking oil
Instructions:
For the eggplant:
- Fry eggplant until the skin turns black and crispy. The blacker and harder it is, the easier it will be to peel!
- Remove the eggplants from the pan and transfer to a plate. Let it cool down.
- Peel off the eggplants’ skin using your fingers.
- Flatten the skinless eggplants with a fork
- Set aside and cook the ground pork
For the ground pork:
- Saute onion, garlic, and tomato in cooking oil.
- Throw in the ground pork and fry until it turns brown. Mix the pork together with the onion, garlic, and tomatoes, then transfer to another plate when done.
Back to the eggplants:
- Crack eggs and beat them well in a bowl
- Dip the flattened eggplant in the bowl with eggs
- Fry the eggplants and add the ground pork mixture on the top part. Fry for a few more minutes and pour a bit of the beaten eggs mixture.
- Flip the eggplants over slowly and carefully to cook the opposite side and fry for a few more minutes.
Mike asked me: “Is this the first time you’re making this?” I said yes, and he said: “It’s good!” Yahoooo!!! Mike doesn’t really like eggplants either so the fact that he liked it meant that my version of the Tortang Talong was a success! That made me want to GILING GILING!
You can do without the meat, if you prefer, but I find that adding the ground pork really amplified the taste of this dish. Anyway, whether you want to go meatless or meat-free, I’d like to encourage you to try making this because it’s not that hard to make. If a Tortang Talong newbie like me can do it, you can too!
