home-grown aubergine recipe

For dinner we had home-grown aubergine from the oven with curry, walnuts and honey.

A very simple vegetarian recipe for a quick surprise dinner. It looks exotic and oriental and has a very special taste.

Combine an aubergine with curry, walnuts and honey to get a real taste explosion. It takes only 10 minutes to prepare and the oven does the rest of the work. Serve it as a starter, side dish or lunch.

Ingredients for 2 people:

- 2 aubergines
- walnuts
- 2 cloves of garlic
- olive oil
- honey
- lemon juice
- curry
- salt
- black pepper

Preparation time: 10 minutes
Oven time: 1 hour

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Wash the aubergines, pat them dry and cut them lengthwise into thin slices and put them in a greased baking dish.

Brush the aubergines with olive oil and drizzle the honey and lemon juice over the top. Cut the garlic cloves into slices and divide them over the tops.

Finally, walnuts, curry, pepper and salt over the aubergines and put the baking tin in the oven. Bake the aubergines for about 1 hour. Keep a close eye on the aubergines during that time. If they get too brown on top, cover them with aluminum foil.

Meanwhile set the table attractively, because with a nicely set table, everything tastes even better!

PS: Last week I made a Moroccan Zaalouk salad with the first harvested aubergines.

aubergines

Homegrown aubergines in the backyard.

Almost ready to be harvested. It's the first time this year that I have tried to cultivate an aubergine plant in my garden. After years of tomato- and pepper plants, I wanted to try something different and this vegetable plant turns out to be a good choice.

The deep purple veggies have grown so fast during the past tropical weeks. It was interesting to monitor the growth of the eggplant closely and to see how the attractive lilac flowers turned into aubergines.

It reminded me of the artistic aubergine paintings by Erik Mattijssen from an exhibition a year ago. The paintings are so colorful and inspiring. The Pacifico painting from 2009, with eggplants in food cans, was my favorite masterpiece.

If only i would have planted the plant in a tin... I have to remember this for next year.

Next week I'm going to try the Zaalouk recipe, a delicious Moroccan aubergine salad with eggplant as the main ingredient.