kitchen eggventures!

Firstly, a big thank you to you-know-who-you-are for the hilarious season's greetings from across the pond - yes, it certainly got us laughing :-) here's a pic to share with y'all out there :-)

Yes, that's Santa's butt :-)

And so, what's all these "eggventures", you ask?

Well, about a month ago, my occasional tennis mate brought up the topic of eggplants, and possible ways to prepare them. Sounded easy enough. And a few weeks later I found myself at a Whole Foods store, staring at a large pile of scrumptious-looking brinjals/eggplants/aubergines. Took two medium-sized ones for further experimentation.

The first:

following the instructions from tennis pal, complemented by a similar recipe I found online, I poked a few holes into the thing and put it to broil in the oven. The plan was, once it gets all charred, to let it cool, cut in half, then scoop the flesh into a bowl and add some goodies and mix voila.

I think I didn't poke enough holes.

It went kablooey.

Here's how it looked in the oven.

It wasn't that bad of a clean-up job (the next day lah!)

It wasn't too too bad in terms of salvageability (sp?) either, managed to get a decent baba ganoush-like dish together,,, edible, but not that exciting....

Second try:

For this one I went the opposite way - processed the raw eggplant first, mixed it with a can of diced tomatoes, a cup of breadcrumbs and some other stuff, then put them all back into the halves, and had that into the oven for 30mins or so.

Turned out A LOT better than the first one.

Extremely filling tho.

And now we're all eggplanted out for a while.