Asian Eggplant Dishes, Part 3
Chinese favor the longer eggplant cooked with brown sauce and served warm, sometimes as dim sum.
I was introduced to Chinese dim sum by Leonard in San Francisco when we were grad students at Stanford. The meals were long, filled with laughter, bad jokes and familial teasing from our cousins, Leonard & Susie’s sons. We always left stuffed just like the eggplant. These were day adventures, not of the overnight kind, but no less satisfying.
Another joyous association of a favorite aunt and uncle with eggplant, one of the most versatile and prolific crops a home gardener can grow.
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It’s Sunday, time to prep for the week ahead. Dishes done, I head downstairs to, you guessed it, the laundry room. I walk past the TV and stop dead in my tracks when I feel something underfoot on the brand spanky-new raspberry colored carpet. I lift my foot to rest my weight on my heel and peer downwards, curious at the sensation of not-carpet underfoot.
“Oh shit” I blurt as I crouch to look more closely. Literally, shit. Rat shit. “K!” I yell across the house, “We’ve got rat shit down here! And it’s on the brand spanky-new raspberry colored carpet” I sing out. I hate it when he yells at me across the house, but there are times rules just need to be broken.
“What’s up?” he says tumbling down the stairs. “You know we have a rule about not yelling across the house, right?” he says mildly annoyed. I point at the carpet wordlessly. “Oh so you literally mean ‘shit’” says he. “How do you know it’s rat shit? And its right on the brand spanky-new raspberry colored carpet. Where is IT, the rat, I mean?!”
“Rat poop is larger than mice poop” I inform him, trying to clean up my language. “ Remember we heard that sound the other night when we were watching TV?
“Oh, yeah. You think that it, or they, are down here?” he says walking around with a flashlight now scanning the floor for scat.
“I’ve been hearing something in the laundry room and have had a lingering feeling that there’s something in the kitchen too” I add. “I’ll call an exterminator to help locate them and remove them.
“We need to figure out how they got in too” he adds, thinking over the whole situation.
“Right you are, as usual.”
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Highly accomplished and intelligent, species in the genus Ratus have navigated around the world both by land and by water. An excellent swimmer capable of holding its breath for minutes at a time, rats have used various means of water transport including floating logs and sailing ships to colonize most land masses on Earth; Antarctica which remains too cold for them but perhaps not for long. There are 56 species of the genus Ratus.
“Commensals” they live near and with mankind, eating our garbage, living near our heat vents, and using our sewers as highways. Bucks and does (male and female rats) reach sexual maturity at about 6 weeks, and pregnant “dams” birth 5-12 “pups” or “kittens” at a time. Appropriately enough, a group of rats is called a “mischief”.
Of course rats make wonderful pets, delightful storybook characters such as Templeton in E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” and Stewart in “Stewart Little”, and make excellent subjects for scientific research. In a 2020 study, rats learned to drive their own cars. Not a frivolous undertaking, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert and her team at the University of Richmond, compared the driving abilities of rats raised in standard lab cages with those raised in “an enriched environment” filled with toys and things to do. Watch the video to see how the rats were rewarded for driving well, who got a driving license and who did not, and why the researchers concluded that the rats liked driving and that, unlike us, it lowered their stress!
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Several days later, the exterminator arrived. The rats ( yes, plural) had likely gotten in not via the dryer vent (we knew enough to plug that), but via a clandestine hole in the brickwork in the side of the house. So much for the little pig, huh? The hole led to the joints directly under the kitchen floor and directly above the laundry room. The rats had indeed been running inside the floor between the kitchen and the laundry floor. This explained both my ongoing sense of ‘wrong’ in the kitchen and the hunting behavior of Rascal and Chaos in the prior week or so.
“Thanks for plugging that hole and setting the traps. We’ll watch the traps and let you know if we get anything. Think you’ve got our bases covered now?” I asked hopefully.
“They could be nesting somewhere inside too. Can I check the attic? he asks.
“Absolutely. Let me show you how to get up there.” I lead him up. Forty minutes pass.
“All clear up there. Never seen such a clean and tidy attic” he said smiling.
“I try” I grinned back at him.
“Is it possible they’ve been nesting somewhere else in the house?” I ask as an afterthought walking him to the front door.
“You have any crawl spaces? They like those.”
“Yes, I store some things there - bubble wrap and peanuts for shipping - nothing that might attract them like food.” We head back down to the basement laundry room.
I point. He lifts out the panel and trains his flashlight into the void. I gasp.
“Guess we found them” he says not unsympathetically looking at my horrified expression. “No, we don’t offer any cleaning services, ma’m” he said anticipating my next question as he began packing up. “I’ll let myself out. I know the way. Have a good day.”
There, in the open hole amongst the shredded insulation, are several ripped bags that had been neatly protecting my packing materials; flattened cardboard boxes now scratched and stained a smelly yellow; abundant scat; and a round, fluffy rat-kind-of-beautiful raspberry colored nest made from the remnants of the brand spanky-new raspberry colored carpet.
***
It’s later. We’ve cleaned up and gotten rid of the mess. I’ve showered. Twice.
And, once again, the kitchen is a bit messy with all the good things in life, just the way that Leonard and Susie showed us that it could be even when there are rats and all in the mix.
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Cover image by: El Mono Español, 25 August 2022, "Chinese eggplant (Berenjena china)". Source: Wikimedia Commons
Images in this article by: Northern Lights Photography, 1980, "Leonard in B&W".
