The low-light photo doesn’t do it justice. Usually I don’t post something the first time I make it, but this will be the last time for the season too. Enough pickles on the shelf, and no tahini in the pantry for baba ganoush, and a batch of chick peas cooked for felafel. So I tried something different. And now there are no more eggplants till next year to do it…
Peeled, the red eggplants work in just about any eggplant recipe. They are a bit more bitter and I tend to pick them green, just as the colour turns for most recipes. Unpeeled and fully ripe, they work brilliantly in an Indian style eggplant pickle.
I’m very proud of these. Eggplants are one of my difficult crops. In my garden they are prone to attack by flea beetles. The flea beetles themselves are a nuisance – they chew holes in the leaves – but not critical. But they spread virus diseases and the nightshade family (that eggplants belong to) is very prone to virus diseases. And I live in an area where wild tobacco (Solanum…
I spent a couple of hours making corn vadai and azuki vadai and eggplant and beetroot pakora and zucchini muthia, and I really needn’t have bothered cos there were two clear favourites on the platter, and they were the quickest and easiest ones – the muthia and the pakoras.
The Recipe: Chargrilled Summer Vegetables with Grilled Garlic and Yoghurt Sauce
The thing I am finding about the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge is that the range of healthy, from scratch, vegetarian dinners you can make in half an hour is much bigger if you put a bit of pre-thinking into it. Proving dough, soaking beans, salting eggplant all take only minutes to do, but you have to do them ahead of time.
Just because they look like party food doesn’t mean they can’t be really healthy, low fat, midweek dinner food. And I love the social aspect of all just sitting round the table sharing one platter, rather than individual plates. Everyone has their own favourites. Conversation flows. It’s nice.
I can’t say this is fast and easy. It’s a long slow Sunday afternoon recipe, and it creates quite a bit of washing up! But there’s a good return on investment – for an hour or so of Sunday afternoon baking, you can have several very healthy dinners and lunches made ready for the week.
As seasonal a recipe as they come, this eggplant with pizza topping is easy and fast.
This recipe is not so much a way of preserving them as a way of making them a lot more popular (although it will last a long time in the fridge if someone doesn’t eat it first, which is highly unlikely because it is seriously delicious, for example on rye bread with cheese or in pitta bread with hummus, mmmm.)