Afghan aubergines with yoghurt

Afghan aubergines with yoghurt

I've been enjoying Sally Butcher's book Veggiestan which we have out from the library at the moment and am - as regular readers will doubtless be aware - rather easily persuaded into trying any recipe that involves fried aubergines.

There are two things, though, that really irritate me about the book: 

• firstly, that it is randomly patronising at times "if you don't have a lid, you can improvise one with foil", really?  really?! thank you so much for that tip, it's changed my culinary life, I would not at all have figured that out under my own steam... ; and
• secondly, as knowledgeable as the author seems to be about Middle Eastern food, she seems to be almost entirely unaware of its connections to Indian food.  For instance, she has a whole page on how drinking a salty, yoghurty drink is uniquely Iranian, *cough* salted lassi *cough*. Gujarati and Afghani food, especially, have a lot in common.  I learned a while back that there's strong historical evidence that my sub-caste (Lohana) are from Afghanistan originally, which I sometimes ponder when making recipes like this one which clearly are extremely Indian in flavours.

Basically, you fry some aubergines:

Frying aubergine slices

Frying aubergine slices

Add tomatoes, onions, chilli, coriander and tumeric and simmer for about 30 minutes, adding water if you need it:

Fried aubergine slices with tomatoes, onions, coriander and
chilli

Fried aubergine slices with tomatoes, onions, coriander and
chilli

Fried aubergine slices with tomatoes, onions, coriander
and chilli after 30 minutes of simmering

Layer it in a dish with the yoghurty sauce (yoghurt, lemon juice, garlic and mint - basically raita *cough* Sally Butcher..) and serve either hot or at room temperature.  Both myself and the lovely spouse thought it tasted even better the next day.

Afghan aubergines with yoghurt

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon - Ottolenghi recipe

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon

So, I've got Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookbook out from the library at the moment - it is awesome, by the way  - and, inevitably, an aubergine recipe caught my eye..  It's funny, I clearly named this blog after aubergines but, honestly, I didn't realise just how much I cooked with them until I started posting and "aubergines" started looming so large in the tags list.  They are amazing, though - so versatile!  Anyway.  Anything that includes fried onions and lemon and aubergine is good for me..  

Ottolenghi has helpfully put the whole recipe in a Guardian article here so I won't bore you with the details but basically, you cut crosses in aubergines and roast them with olive oil, salt and black pepper on top:

The sacrificial aubergines with their flesh cut open

The sacrificial aubergines with their flesh cut open

I slid some garlic into the slits because it is tasty and I could (Ottolenghi refrains):

Black peppery aubergines with stealthy garlic slipped in

You then fry some onion with chilli and sumac and tasty things of this nature:

For a minute at the end you add in the feta:

And then you mix the chopped lemon flesh, chilli and garlic in with the onions and feta mixture and put on top of the roasted aubergines:  voila!  You can eat warm or at room temperature as you prefer.  It is quite an intense dish, so I recommend something relatively bland to go with it - some nice bread, perhaps.

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon

This may sound obvious but you really do have to like lemon for this dish to work for you.  Lots of recipes with lemon call for just a little twist of it but this one - with the whole chopped lemon in it - really requires you to love your lemons.  Luckily, I do.  I've always loved sour flavours, I was always That Child who stole the citrus slices from everyone's drinks.

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon

Pizza - leek/roquefort and sundried tomato/aubergine/mozzarella

Leek and Roquefort pizza

A few years ago, my lovely husband acquired a pizza dough recipe from an Italian friend of his (Guisceppe - I don't suppose you're reading but, if you are, we love you and your pizza recipe!), and we've used it regularly ever since.  It produces perfect (Italian-style, thin crust) pizza every time. 

I reproduce it below as given to us as, frankly, his directions are a lot more precise than mine.

Aubergine, sundried tomato and mozzarella pizza

Usually, we slightly ruin the purity of the recipe by piling it high with all kinds of things.  Oh, we have onions, let's put those on, look we've got half a jar of olives left over from caponata, we'll pile those on, oooh but we have that bit of gorgonzola..  etc, etc.  Our pizzas are usually half pizzas, half mountains.  Anyway. 

This time we decided - for no particular reason - that we'd try to be a bit more focussed and so we we went for one pizza with white sauce, leek and roquefort and one with tomato sauce, sundried tomatoes/aubergines/mozzarella.  We fried up the leeks before putting them on the pizza and roasted the aubergine slices.

They were Good.  

Leek and Roquefort pizza

Sundried tomato, aubergine and mozzarella pizza

Pizza dough

Caponata in gram flour pancakes

For some reason, I have never attempted to make caponata before.  I don't know why.  It combines many of my favourite things:  aubergines; olives; capers; tomatoes. 

I think it may be because I first had it, when cooked by my Italian best friend at university, who has been one of the big influences on me cooking-wise.  I wish I could say the same were true vice versa but I fear she still thinks I'm a barbarian with no tastebuds because of my general love for strong flavours.  It's not that she did a bad job when cooking it, it's more that I realised through cooking with her a lot that I just plain understood very little about non-Gujarati food at 18 and I found it all rather intimidating.

Funny-looking aubergine

Anyway.  I bought a funny-looking aubergine (see right) at the supermarket the other day - yes, I did buy it basically because it was funny-looking, yes, I do have a mental age of about 7 - and I thought I'd give it a go.

Anyway.  Caponata.  I went for a combination of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe, a vague recollection of what my Italian friend did, and whim.

I chopped an onion, a couple of sticks of celery and three cloves of garlic.  Fried for a few minutes  Then added a tin of reasonably nice Italian tomatoes, some chopped green olives and some capers. 

onion, celery and garlic

chopped aubergines

Did a bit of seasoning at this stage (and tweaked and tasted at the end)-  some balsamic vinegar (about 3 table spoons) and about 4 table spoons of sugar.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall suggested only a table spoon of sugar but, to me, that just didn't taste quite right so I kept adding more until it did, and obviously salt and black pepper.  Left to reduce for around 15 minutes. 

Caponata

Frying aubergines

While that was reducing, I chopped up a couple of aubergines into relatively small pieces (about 1.5 cm square) and fried until golden in some olive oil. 

I then combined the aubergine with the onions/celery/tomato mixture, Topped it with fresh parsley.  Though, I did think belatedly that rosemary would have been nice as well and might be worth a try next time.

gram flour pancakes batter

For no particular reason, I decided that it would be good to have the caponata in pancakes and I haven't made gram flour pancakes for ages, so that's what I went for.  Went for a gram flour/plain flour mix - 2:1 ratio - added a dash of milk, and then enough water to make it a pouring consistency (just slightly thicker than single cream), spiced it a bit with salt, chilli flakes and black pepper.

gram flour pancake about to be filled with caponata

Heated up about a table spoon of olive oil in a large frying pan, cooked the pancakes (it takes around a couple of mins each side, depending obviously on how thick you want your pancakes), filled them with the caponata and put them in the oven for about 5 mins to warm through before serving.

It was pretty good.  Nice fun dish to cook on a Sunday afternoon.  In retrospect, I'm not sure that it's really worth bothering with the pancakes - I think bread would have been just as nice with the caponata and a bit less of a faff but I like my gram flour pancakes so I don't really repine!

Gram flour pancakes with caponata

Lebanese Moussaka

Lebanese moussaka

Even though we'd only just had another dish with fried aubergines, while I had Paola Gavin's Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking out of the library, I decided to make another:  Lebanese moussaka.  This is similar to Greek moussaka but, crucially, vegetarian. 

It involves the now familiar-to-me frying of the aubergine slices, setting them aside.  Then frying an onion and garlic in olive oil, adding chickpeas and tinned tomatoes, salt, black pepper and allspice.  Then layering the mixture in between aubergine slices and baking for around 15 minutes at 200 degrees C.

Ready to go into the oven

Ready to go into the oven

I really liked it but, then, it involved aubergines AND chickpeas so that is not wholly surprising.  I do think, next time, I might spice it more - I was trying to be good and follow the recipe but I think it could use a bit of chilli or something else to pep it up a bit.

Baked Aubergine with Tomatoes and Feta (Melitzanes Fournou me Tyri)

I've mentioned Paola Gavin's Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking before.  I've been trying a few more things from it out.  One of the things I really like about the book is that it has some more unusual things in it.  One of them was this recipe which is the Greek version of the classic aubergine/eggplant parmigiana or parmigana di melanzane.

Essentially, it is the same dish but with feta instead of mozzarella and kafalotyri instead of parmesan (if you can find it, I didn't bother since I had parmesan in the house).  I loved it - surprisingly different tasting to aubergine parmigiana despite being prepared in virtually the same way - much more intense than the Italian dish, perhaps not surprising as Greek food in general is more gutsy than Italian food which for my tastebuds can sometimes get a bit too delicate.

Essentially, you slice and fry a couple of medium sized aubergines.    Put them aside.  They look like fish.  It is silly.

Frying aubergine slices

Frying aubergine slices

Then make some tomato sauce - I went for a tin of nice Italian tomatoes simmered and seasoned with garlic, salt, pepper and a dash of red wine.  Then crumble 200g of feta in a bowl.  Then put some of the aubergine slices on the bottom of a baking dish, put over a third of the tomato sauce, a third of the feta.

Aubergine slices with tomato sauce and feta

Aubergine slices with tomato sauce and feta

Do that again until you've run out of stuff and put the kafalotryi or parmesan on top at the end.  Then bake at 180 degrees for around 20 minutes until the top is golden.

Baked aubergines with tomatoes and feta ready to go into the oven

Baked aubergines with tomatoes and feta ready to eat

Imam Bayildi, Arto Der Haroutunian recipe

Stuffed - pre baking

I have a lovely book on vegetarian Middle Eastern cookery by Arto Der Haroutunian.  One of the thing I love about the book is the little stories that accompany every recipe.  One tells me that a Persian proverb is "Even the worm in the rock dreams of fresh herbs"!  Another tells the story of the name of this dish - "the imam fainted" due to its deliciousness.

I've always wanted to try it but it's quite fiddly so it's taken me a little while to get around to it.

Mighty Aubergines!

 The recipe involves frying up onions, green peppers, tomatoes, garlic with paprika, salt and black pepper slowly with lots of olive oil.  You then put a slit in each aubergine and fry them in 250 ml of oil.  This was where I got a bit stuck.  Much as I love this cookbook, one thing it's a bit short on are detailed instructions.

In this case, it told me "fry the aubergine until the flesh has started to soften".  Clearly, it starts to soften almost immediately!  When you stop really depends on how much softening counts as softening!  

Stuffed - pre baking

Eventually, I went for frying them for about 15 mins, when the outer flesh was soft but the aubergines were still not completely cooked.  You then open up the slits a bit, stuff them with the onion/pepper mixture, then bake for an hour with some water to cover the bottom of the dish.

Stuffed - pre baking

Overall verdict:  pretty damn tasty.  But:

• this recipe is realy quite faffy compared to some others and I'm slightly dubious as to whether it's really quite worth it..
• because, unlike some other recipes, this recipe doesn't involve scooping out any of the inside flesh of the aubergine, the resulting dish involves quite large chunks of aubergine flesh - which tastes nice but ended up very undersalted as there wasn't really a way to salt it and aubergine really needs salt to taste really good.

I think the stuffing was the best bit - the slow frying suggested by the recipe and the sheer quantity of olive oil involved made it gorgeous. I might just stop there next time!