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

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

Tsaizika - coiled aubergine and feta filo pastry

Tsaizika - cooked

So, as mentioned before, I like to take cookbooks out of the library to test them out before adding them to my (rather too large) cookbook collection.  The other week, I took out Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking by Paola Gavin.  I took it out because it had so many unusual recipes - mostly variations on better known themes - but still.  I like cookbooks with unusual recipes.




I recently tried out my first recipe from her book - for tsaizika which I've never had before but she tells me is a Sephardic Jewish speciality from Greece.  Essentially, what this is is coiled filo pastry with a filling made from burnt aubergine pulp, feta and eggs.   Mmmmm.  In the MightyAubergine household, it generated a certain amount of hilarity:

My lovely husband:  Wow, that looks...  yoni-esque

Me:  How rude!  I'm going to put that in my blog!

MLH:  Oh, come on, you were thinking it too!

Me:  No, I wasn't!

MLH:  I bet you are now!

Me:  Ye-es.  Can't wait to.. tuck in.

Anyway.

Burnt aubergines, feta, eggs, and parmesan filling

Essentially, the filling consists of:  pulp from two burnt aubergines, 150g of feta, 2 eggs, 100g Kefalotyri (or parmesan if you have none) mashed together and seasoned with salt, black pepper and nutmeg. 

Cheat - burnt aubergines in a jar

I am pretty good at doing the burnt aubergine thing but it is time consuming and so I tend to cheat and use jars of burnt aubergine which are available from my local Turkish supermarket.  (Photo to the left.) They have the advantage of also working out quite a lot cheaper.  If you have no local Turkish supermarket or just prefer to do these things yourself, Ottolenghi's description of how to do that bit is pretty good and can be found here. 

You then roll the filling up in tubes of filo pastry (around 3 cm thick) and coil them up like a Danish pastry on an oiled baking sheet.  When you're done coiling up one roll, you do another roll and add that to the existing one to enlarge the coil.  And so on and so forth until you've run out of..  something.  I ran out of filling first.  You then bake for 180 degrees for about 30 mins or until the top is golden brown.

Tsaizika - all coiled up with the oven to go

Tsaizika - all coiled up with the oven to go

The process of coiling was..  a little messy and it decidedly did not look very artistic.  There was a certain amount of spillage as not all of the tubes held together very well.  I overlapped the next tube when that happened and kept it all quite tightly coiled and, actually, the end result was no spillage at all.  I left it to stand for a couple of minutes before cutting into it but, although I fully expected it to explode a bit, the filling was the perfect consistency - moist but non-explosive.  

Tsaizika - cooked

Tsaizika - cooked

Tsaizika - cooked - non explosive filling!

The dish was lovely - one of the most interesting things I've cooked recently.  Though, I did think it could usea different texture in the filling - the feta and the aubergine are both quite similar in that sense - perhaps olives?  or sun-dried tomatoes?  or pine nuts? I also wondered just how important all this coiling business was..  I mean, it was kind of fun but I might be inclined next time just to make it as a pie.  Or as savoury baklava.  Hmmm.  

I have been slightly spoiled by beautiful food photography in most of the cookbooks that I own and I really missed photographs/illustrations when doing this recipe - my lovely husband and I had to debate exactly how to coil the pastry using a rolled up piece of kitchen towel - but, actually, the directions that Paola Gavin gives (at least in this recipe, I have yet to try anything else in the book) were clear enough that I coped just fine.

Brunch - gram flour, feta, spring onion, bell pepper and carrot pancakes

Inspired by previous adventures in gram flour pancake making, I decided to try making some more but, this time, for brunch rather than dinner.

Mixture

I went for a similar basic mixture to Maria Elia's recipe - gram flour, semolina and water - but spring onions, bell pepper, carrots and feta instead of just carrots.  To be honest, this was mostly because this was what we had in the house - I think the spring onions and feta were lovely but that the other vegetables, you could substitute in with other vegetables.  Mushrooms would be nice, I think.

Tasty pancakes

Since it was brunch, I also kept the spicing more minimal - just salt and black pepper rather than chilli and ginger and stuff. 

They were fun to make - I love the way that they sizzle in the pan and it's a childish pleasure to compete with myself to see how many I can get to turn over without breaking at all.

I'm not sure why but they tasted rather like omlettes - same kind of squishy texture.  One to make again, perhaps when I have some fresh herbs to use up, as I think that that would convert these from tasty to delicious.