Sunday 17 August 2008

Baingan Bharta (eggplant curry)

(Originally posted by Tami)

Not really BUT I did tell Debs that I was leaving OWOA about 2 weeks ago. I haven’t been around or weighed in a few weeks. I started school and am still struggling to juggle my time and thought it best to leave the group. I’ve also been dealing with a great bit of home sickness. Yes, I know that I was born and raised here in Western WA and only lived in TN just over 2 years but it’s home. The south is deep in my blood and always has been. My grandad was born and raised in Arkansas. Still loves it to this day but never moved away from WA after he retired from the airforce because my Grandmother detested the south. Not me. His blood, his love runs deep in these veins. Any hoots! My longing to get back there isn’t helped by the cool grey days we’ve had here. Summer seemed to skip us over…until yesterday. Now it’s like 70 but still breezy. I don’t know if that can be considered summer.

I just make something yummy and before sending the recipe to Debs to ask that she share it with y’all I thought I’d see if I still had posting priveledges. Guess what?! I guess I do. So, without further ado I would like to share something that I found at Allrecipes. I had one lowly eggplant sitting in my fridge and since Jeff hates the thing I thought I’d use it for lunch.

Baingan Bharta (eggplant curry)

1 large eggplant

2 tablespoons veggie oil (I used olive oil)

1 teaspoon cumin seeds (I used ground cumin)

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon ginger garlic paste (I just minced 4 gloves of garlic and sprinkled in some ground garlic)

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 tomato, diced (didn’t have any because of the recall so I used sundried tomatoes in oil…I was skeptical but it worked well)

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1 fresh jalapeno, finely chopped

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 bunch cilantro, finely chopped

Preheat oven to 450F. Place eggplant on a medium baking sheet. Bake 20-30 mintues until tender. Remove from heat, cool, peel, and chop. (I placed the hot eggplant immediately into a brown lunch sack and put it in the fridge. I was hungry and didn’t want to wait forever for the skin to seperate from the meat) Heat oil in a medium saucepan (skillet) over medium heat. Mix in cumin seeds and onion. Cook and stir until onion is tender. Mix ginger garlic paste, curry powder, and tomato into the saucepan, and cook about 1 minute. Stir in yogurt. Mix in eggplant and jalapeno pepper and season with salt. Cover and cook 10 minutes over high heatRemove cover, reduce heat to low and continue cooking about 5 minutes. Garnish with cilantro to serve.

It supossedly feeds for…um…I ate half of it…not in one sitting mind you. I put 1/4 of it in a bowl, sat and ate it then got back up, put more in my bowl, sat back down and ate that bit. So see, I ate 1/2 the recipe in 2 sittings.

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