“As a relative beginner myself, I reckoned you couldn’t assume beginners knew anything, so there had better be a Beginner’s Index—which back then included having to explain what an aubergine was.”
Katharine Whitehorn, Cooking In A Bedsitter
If I had lived in 631 AD I would have sought to be a lady-in-waiting to Queen Pourandokht of Persia, who was so keen on yoghurt that her name got subsumed into Farsi in the form of Borani, to mean pretty much anything cooked with yoghurt. Her culinary approach is right up my street. So this is a type of Borani with aubergines.
Serve with Turkish meatballs…. or any kind of meatballs…
Paprika-permeated, mint-scented, yoghurt-smothered, regal aubergines
Serves – 6
Ingredients
- 2 aubergines
- about 120ml/½ cup olive oil
- 2 fat cloves of garlic, crushed with
- 1 tsp smoked salt
- 300 ml/1¼ cups thick Greek yoghurt
- 1 tbsp tahini
- 1 tbsp pomegranate molasses
- The odd squirt of lime or lemon juice
- 25g/1 oz pack (a handful from the garden) of flat-leaved parsley, roughly chopped (you can include the stems)
- Sweet, smoked Spanish paprika
Instructions
- Pre heat the oven to 210ºC
- Chop off the stalk, and the hard, rough bit at the bottom of the aubergines
- Slice thinly and coat in oil
- Lay out on a baking sheet, and bake for about five minutes on both sides
- In a bowl mix the yoghurt and the tahini, garlic and lime or lemon juice
- On a serving platter lay out the aubergine slices, drizzle over the pomegranate molasses, sprinkle over the parsley, cover the whole with a snowy blanket of yoghurt, dappled with scarlet paprika