Since our house is mostly fixed up and we accomplished Project Get Married, I've hosted people for Friday night dinner two weeks in a row! Last week was roast duck and rice with dried fruits, apples and butternut squash (recipe to come). This week, my friend Karol and her husband Shai were coming over. I originally was going to just serve snacks, but everything I wanted to make for snacks was nitpicky and I wanted something easy...so I stopped by a lovely Lebanese store after a meeting with a client on Friday and picked up a few pastries with spinach and cheese or meat, little containers of eggplant salad, yogurt with cucumbers, hummus, lovely olives and fresh baked pita. I put those out on the counter for people to nibble on with wine while I put up the Turkish Eggplant dish, unstuffed with a meat and rice mixture (I love having an open kitchen, where people can comfortably hand out with me while I cook!). It's much easier than the longish recipe seems, and the only sort of fussy step is initially cooking the eggplants on the stove top, but it is necessary. I call the eggplants unstuffed because I couldn't be bothered to stuff them before cooking, but they do end up looking stuffed when you serve them.
Either or both the eggplant preparation and the unstuffing preparation can be done well ahead of time, and the whole thing can be assembled ahead of time as well and refrigerated until you want to cook it or just cook the whole thing the day before and heat it up in a low oven. The small amount of leftovers was delicious today!
Turkish Eggplants
4 -6 small Italian eggplants, peeled but with the top “cap” remaining, with a slit down the long side, soaked in very well salted water at least 20 minutes
4-6 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 lbs ground beef or lamb
Tablespoon tomato paste
¾ cup basmati rice, cooked in 3 cups of water until par boiled, about 10 minutes
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon allspice
½ teaspoon Allepo pepper
Pinch of red pepper flakes
¼ cup of dried currants
½ cup each of chopped dill and flat parsley
Dried mint for garnish
Full fat plain (I suggest Greek) yogurt for serving
Handful of fresh pomegranate seeds for garnish (optional)
First, preheat the oven to 375 degrees and set the rice to cook in a small pot by bringing to a boil then turning down to a simmer. We are not cooking the rice to donenesss, nor are we trying to cook out all the water. Cook about 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a medium sized dutch oven with a lid, saute the onion and garlic in olive oil until softened but not browned. After a few minutes, add the tomato paste and stir, then add the ground beef or lamb. Allow to cook until no longer red, then adding the parboiled rice along with the liquid remaining in the pot. Add salt, peppers, dill, parsley and currants. Cook for about 20 minutes on a low simmer. If there isn’t enough liquid that it’s a little soupy, add some more water or chicken stock, make sure it doesn’t dry out!
While the meat cooks, after soaking the eggplants in salted water for at least 20 minutes, pat them dry and pan fry in olive oil until browned and slightly softened. Put aside.
After the meat and rice mixture has simmered for about 20 minutes, lay the pan fried eggplants on top of the mixture and spoon some of it over them, so the eggplants are sort of submerged inside the mixture, but don’t worry about getting them completely covered. Put the lid on and bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. At that point, make sure that the eggplants are completely cooked; if they are a little hard, cook an extra 15 minutes, but if you softened them during the pan saute step, this shouldn’t be an issue.
To plate, place an eggplant in a small bowl open it up (I inserted tongs into the slit I made when I peeled the eggplants) and spoon in the meat and rice mixture. Overflow the eggplant with the mixture and sprinkle with dried mint and a few pomegranate seeds if you have them around. Serve with yogurt on the side if you wish; I did not.
