My platter this week was centred around a bowl of smoky eggplant and pomegranate dip, sort of like babaganoush but with pomegranate instead of lemon juice.
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.