Turkish Baked Eggplant

Tim, I love eggplant and I know it's not necessarily a vegetable that everyone does as well, but it's always nice to introduce people to different veggies and how you can cook them and this really speaks well for eggplant, this dish, because there's so many great spices and flavours in it. I love it. Now to prep the eggplant it's important to do so in advance, slice and salt it and that brings those bitter flavours out of the eggplant and you'll notice that it makes it almost like sweat a little bit, I call it. Yeah, I don't know how else to describe it. And then if you could wipe that off and get some extra virgin olive oil over them and into the oven at 200 degrees for around 30 minutes. That's our first step to get our eggplant cooking for our imam bayildi. Whilst that happens I'm going to heat up some olive oil on the stove top and get our onion and green capsicum cooking. I love eggplant or aubergine if you're playing overseas, I just think it's such a gorgeous vegetable because it's like a sponge it just soaks up all those gorgeous flavours, whatever you want to put with it. That's right, we often have it cooked in the fridge because it's great to throw into salads or wraps during the week just as a way to make things a little bit more meaty and hearty. It's up there with mushroom for me, it's got that similar texture almost and that really sort of robust flavour to it. All right, in we go. So we'll finally dice our green capsicum. I've chosen the green capsicum because it's more traditional in this dish and it's a little less sweet green capsicum. You feeling peckish? Can I entice you with something nutritious while we cook? Oh sure, I love capsicum. So we've got a medium heat on our olive oil and then we'll get our red onion in. You could also use a white onion or I see you use a lot of shallot too. I love shallots for certain dishes but there's nothing wrong with a red onion or a brown onion. I like the red onion because they're actually high in antioxidants, quercetin is the antioxidant, that's part of what gives it that beautiful colour as well. So we'll cook off the red onion with the green capsicum until it's soft and then we'll add in our spices, garlic and tomato. You'll probably need a good five to six minutes on this one, keep an eye on it before the rest of the veggies and spices go in. So the eggplants have cooked, I'm loving how they're looking, there's a nice little bit of golden on the flesh. We've cooked our basmati rice that didn't take long in the microwave. I got the hard job. I know, that's been cooked and we're going to get that into our serving platter and toss it with some butter. Did you say butter? I know, it's like echoing around the kitchen now. I love it. Basmati rice is a really great rice to have on hand. It's actually a low GI rice, it's got a beautiful flavour as well. I actually think it's probably my favourite of the rices and in dishes like these where you could do like a baked rice, I kind of like to cheat it and do it like this and instead of doing a baked buttery rice, I'm just going to mix a bit of butter through my microwave pouch rice which is the easiest way to do it. When I think Turkish cuisine, a nice basmati rice or Thai, I go for a jasmine rice. Yeah, it's so true and that's what you want to look for as well, just complement things. Do these with these little pouches as well. So I'm going to get the eggplant over the top before I get the sauce in. If you've made this in advance and the two things aren't quite the same temp, just crank up the oven, get the sauce in, pop it back into the oven for a little while and that'll bring them to the right temperature and then when you are serving it up, depending on how many people you're serving to, people could take half an eggplant or you could slice it and serve it, doesn't really matter but you want to get a good scoop of that sauce in and then some of that buttery basmati rice. All right, so we've got our tomato on our eggplant. We're going to finish up, if you wouldn't mind chopping up a bit of parsley for me, a bit of dried oregano on the top. You could put this in the sauce but I kind of like the sprinkle and garnish over the top at the end, holds the flavour a bit more when it's sprinkled over at the end as well. A bit of parsley. I'm gonna go a bit more pepper and I hope you're hungry. That looks great Jack, I love that. We're ready to eat. Yes please. There we go, a Turkish inspired imam bayildi, lots of veggies in there, beautiful flavours from the basmati rice, the best looking veggie dish I think I've made in a while actually.