Roasted Eggplant with Tomato and Garlic

You return from the weekend grocery shopping with a bag full of eggplant or aubergine (among other things) and should start making dinner within the next thirty minutes? What do you do? Think about your favourite eggplant dish? If you are anything like me, eggplant would rule. Not only because I have to prevent all those ‘over-shopped’ purple beauties from spoiling, but also because it is one of those vegetables which I find challenging with its often stereotyped recipes! 

Then what? Fry it, grill it, or bake it. Exactly what combination of vegetables? Have it with or without cheese? Should it rule the meal or be happy with a side role? Well, I remember my childhood, Indian days. The whole of winter (okay, I come down to ‘most of the winter’ but that was really it, Mom) my mother will serve a big ‘healthy’ soupy curry with all (mind you, ALL) the available winter vegetables immersed in half a foot of thin red gravy. Well, red because it also included chunks of beet.

This special ‘winter’ ‘healthy’ vegetable dish would inevitably have cabbage, cauliflower, carrot, peas, beet, turnips, beans, potato, tomato, and of course, eggplant or aubergine. That was my mother’s speciality – without analysing the beginning or end of it, I should say winter and vegetables remind me of this soupy red bowl of veggies that smelled and tasted so fresh and warm. And delicious. Doubtlessly. But that’s a story for another time. Now, I have to have something different and special.

After several sighs and frowns, deep-digging thoughts and fluttering through the recipes, Judy Jackson’s The Jewish Cookbook gives me an answer. Jewish and several other Middle East cuisines use aubergine or eggplant almost like its staple food. There is variation, there is spice, and there is uniqueness. I have a particular fascination for these styles of cooking. Many are quite similar in their use of ingredients or ways of cooking with the Indian cuisine that I grew up savouring. Yet, these recipes give me a fresh perspective to the very familiar tastes and spice-mixes that have influenced me all through. They are new and exciting. They don’t seem like the same old thing, even if you made them a dozen times last month.

Roasted Eggplant with Tomato and Garlic 

~~ from The Jewish Cookbook

What do you need?

~ Aubergines/Eggplant – 2 about 225 gms or 8 oz each, the fresher the better

~ Garlic Cloves – 3

~ Tomato – 2 medium size, should make at least 4 tbsp of puree

~ Olive Oil – The original recipe asks for 6-8 tbsp. I used only 3

~ Salt and ground black pepper – according to taste

~ Sugar – ½ tsp (optional). I didn't use it

~ Parsley for garnishing

What should you do?

1. Slice the vegetable in 5mm or ¼ inch thick circles and spread them on a kitchen towel. Sprinkle them generously with salt and leave them to stand for a while, 30 minutes or more, while you babble with your toddler, change the laundry in the machine, or start preparing the Grilled Spicy Potato or the Sweet and Sour Cabbage Soup to go along with this side dish. The resting time ensures that the grains of salt knock off the bitterness off the eggplant. When you come back, they would be sweating. Pat them dry. 

2. Grease a sheet of aluminium foil with one teaspoon of olive oil and place it on the baking tray. Arrange the eggplant rounds on it, in one pretty layer. 

3. Blanch two tomatoes to peel off the skin and grate or mash them to make a puree. In the same bowl, grate three garlic cloves. Sprinkle some salt and black pepper, add a teaspoon of olive oil, and mix well. 

4. Place half a teaspoon of this tomato-garlic mix on each of the eggplant rounds until you use up all of the mix. If you still have some leftover mix after this step, you know what to do with it, right? Give those bigger circles some more helping. 

5. Well, I then used the back of my spoon to dab the mix a little on the rounds. Just for the look of it. But you can simply skip this step. Shove the tray in the oven at a temperature of 190 C or 375 F. 

6. The recipe said it takes 30 minutes to cook the eggplants this way. My oven took around 10 minutes longer. Also, I took them out mid-way, after about 20 minutes, the tomato-garlic mix had by then formed a layer and didn’t come off when I carefully turned the rounds with a fork to made them sit bottom up. Brazed these no-mix sides with my pastry-brush dipped in olive oil – used less than a teaspoon of olive oil for this. Baked for 5 minutes before turning the rounds back to their positions and baked for 10 more minutes.

That served them right. They looked happy and smiling. Beautiful. Ready to eat.

Care for some garnishing? I arranged them in a gradual heap from the sides of the plate to the middle and sprinkled something fresh and green – parsley, basil, cilantro, all will work if you prefer to wait that long. 

In the Jewish way of serving, no dairy or milk product in whatever form is served or used if the same meal includes a meat dish. This rule doesn’t strictly apply to us, although I try to respect it. There wasn’t much meat around, so I made some sour cream dip to go along with this side salad. Or appetizer. Happiness!

Bon appetite.