Creamy Eggplant Curry (Keto, Whole30 & Dairy-Free!) – Easy Low-Carb Recipe!

This eggplant curry is absolutely delicious and easy to make. It has tender chunks of chicken along with luscious eggplant and you can make it all in one pan. There's only one thing left to do. Let's go ahead and make some. You're going to start by dicing about a pound of room temperature chicken thighs. I like the chicken to become room temperature before I cook it. It just makes the chicken juicier and easy to cook. Now it does become a little slippery once it's room temperature. That's why I'm using my tongs along with my knife. I am going to slice these in big chunks bite-sized pieces but kind of big and as you're cutting if you see extra fat this is where you want to remove the fat. Now fat is flavor so you don't want to remove all the fat but any excess fat let's remove it. You can also use chicken breast if you don't prefer thighs but thighs like I said have more flavor. After you are done dicing them we're going to season these with a generous amount of salt. We're going to use about two tablespoons of curry powder. This is going to give it that great flavor. We're going to come in with about a tablespoon of turmeric. Turmeric is going to make it nice and earthy and after the turmeric we're going to go in with some black pepper. Black pepper and turmeric go really really well together and then of course we're going to use my favorite garlic powder. Garlic powder goes in everything and we are going to mix this up. I am using my tongs once again because turmeric does have the tendency to leave stains behind. If you don't want your fingers yellow use tongs or a spoon or you can use gloves. You want to make sure that you are mixing this all in. You want every single cube of chicken to get that delicious spice and it already smells really good. That's when you know that everything is seasoned correctly. We're going to let the seasonings just marinate for a second and let's get started on the zucchini. I am using Chinese zucchini but you can use regular zucchini if you like. I just really like the shape of the zucchini and it's really easy to slice. I am slicing these in one inch diagonal circles. I am slicing these on the diagonal only because it's fancy. That's it. There's no other reason. I just really like the way it looks. I am making sure to slice every single piece as equal as possible because we want these to cook evenly. When you're done slicing you want to get a bowl to put these in. I'm not done but I need a place for these to go right now so I'm putting them in my strainer. I am going to slice my second zucchini. For this recipe I'm using two whole Chinese zucchini. You can use two regular zucchini and you don't have to slice them on a diagonal like this. You can do cubes but I like it to be a different shape than my chicken. You can do long strips. It's whatever you like. This is your dish but I just like them like this because it looks pretty. Now once everything is all sliced we're going to do a little trick. We're going to add a little salt to the zucchini. I don't even know why I chose the container with holes in it but I'm gonna get that salt a little bit later. Adding salt to the zucchini is going to bring all the water that's in the zucchini to the surface and it's going to make your zucchini nice and tender and allow it to cook and get all that salt. Okay I'm going to let these sit for about 10 minutes. Let's get started on the rest of the vegetables. This is a really simple recipe. We're going to slice one half of an onion. I just sliced the onion in half and now I'm going in and slicing little strips. I don't want to dice the onion. I need this dish to have different textures so I'm slicing the onion in bigger strips. You can dice it if you want though. Everything is personable. Then we're going to go in with four cloves of garlic. Well I have three here but you're guaranteed I added more at the end. We're going to slice the four cloves of garlic and I am going to dice these really really really fine so it's not really dicing it's actually chopping. I'm going to chop these really really fine and that's because I want garlic in every single bite of this dish. Garlic is my favorite vegetable of all time so I like to use a lot. After everything is sliced up it's time to put the dish together. Let's get it. You want your skillet or pan to be already hot and I am adding about two tablespoons of avocado oil. You can use olive oil if you want. We're not using a lot of oil. We want to keep this low fat low calories. We're going to add our nicely marinated chicken to this pot. Now I have my heat on about medium to medium high. You don't want to cook this too fast but at the same time you don't want the chicken to get a lot of juice. You know when you cook chicken too low a lot of juice starts forming. You don't want that so you want to cook this high enough where it stays very nice and dry. Your chicken is cooking nicely even but you don't want it to burn so you're going to have to sit here and stir the chicken around. We're making love to this chicken okay. We want this dish to be perfect and as you see I am continuing to adjust the heat based off of the need. Once your chicken is golden brown and delicious and no longer pink in the center it's time to remove it but you want to make sure it's all done. It should look like this. Look how beautiful that is. I am going to contribute some of the color to the turmeric. It makes it so nice and pretty. Remove it from the skillet and just put it on a plate because we're going to use it later. I should have used a bigger plate because you see how they're all falling off but don't worry about it. I'm going to make it work. Once your chicken is removed we're going to use that same skillet okay. This is a one skillet dish. I'm going to go back in with another tablespoon of my oil then I'm going to add those onions. I'm just going to let these saute by themselves for a little bit so they can get soft and I'm also going to taste my chicken to make sure all the seasonings are there and of course it's on point but this will give you an idea of if you need to add more seasonings to your chicken or the dish you can do that. Once the onions are nice and soft it's time to add the garlic and then we're going to add the eggplant. We're going to cook this on a medium heat and we're going to cook these nice and slowly so I need you to have patience. If you want to get the perfect texture from your eggplant you have to cook them on a medium low heat for about 15 to 20 minutes. Now I am going to stir these continuously to make sure that all the eggplant is getting heat and this is what you want to see. You can see that the purple eggplant is turning brown. This is an indicator that it's cooking properly and it's becoming done and this is exactly what you want to see. You want to see the insides nice and soft and then the outsides brown. This means that your zucchini is almost done. I am stirring very gently because at this point they can fall apart and we did not work that hard on that shape for our eggplant to fall apart. Now I'm going to add about a cup of chicken stock and the chicken stock is warm. You always want to add warm liquids to your food that's cooking. You don't want to add cold chicken stock. That's going to bring the temperature down and it's going to make the texture of the food a little wonky. Now I am adding one and a half to two cups of coconut milk and this coconut milk is warm as well and then I'm going to add my chicken back to the pot. Now this is a really important step. We want to make sure everything is all incorporated so I am gently going from the outside in and I am folding in the chicken, the zucchini, and the coconut milk. We want to make sure that everything is evenly mixed in together and at this time this is where you adjust your seasonings as well. So I would take a little spoon and test the sauce. If you need salt, pepper, you adjust it. We're going to cover, reduce the heat and let this simmer for about 10 minutes and then look at that. This is absolutely perfect. It's thick. It's creamy. The eggplant is soft. It's time to plate this up. Now I am going to plate a nice amount of this. If you want to, you can plate this over rice but I want to keep this low carb. We want to keep it low fat. So I am just plating this by itself. It smells absolutely delicious. The chicken is nice and big and tender. The zucchini is luscious and soft. Only thing left to do is garnish with a little cilantro or I might put a lot of cilantro and that's it. Bon Appetit. Let's eat.