Fainting Imam

I really need to read recipe directions more carefully.

Let's start from the beginning. Last weekend we were at Costco and saw these baby eggplants (aka "petite aubergines" which sounds so much prettier) for sale. We had never seen these at Costco before and couldn't resist. Although we had no specific plans for the eggplants when we bought them, I remembered in the back of my mind that I had some stuffed eggplant recipe somewhere in my massive file of 1000+ (PDF) printed recipes and figured we'd make it work.

I have no idea what's up with the girl on the bag...

That stuffed eggplant recipe was this Fainting Imam (Turkish baked stuffed eggplant) recipe from Serious Eats. It sounds delicious but it's a bit time-consuming for your average weeknight. The recipe even says total time is 2 hours, 15 minutes. I remembered thinking that I would need to start this one early on the day we were going to make it. But yesterday I re-read the recipe before making it and somehow thought the entire thing would take me a little over an hour. I had skimmed the recipe for all the numbers that afternoon to figure out how long the eggplant would need to bake. I saw 15 and 15, and then 30 minutes to cool to room temperature. I was confused about why they would say 2 hours, but didn't think much of it. Until I was partway through preparing the recipe (late, since I started after 8 pm), and saw the sentence, "Return to oven and bake an additional hour." Oops. I tried not to panic.

I'm usually better than this at reading comprehension.

Anyway, we ate dinner close to 11 pm, but it turned out okay. I ended up modifying the recipe a little bit, including the way the baking time was split up, to try to eat before midnight. So, here's the adapted recipe for Turkish stuffed eggplant - also known as İmam bayıldı - the way I ended up making it.

To make the eggplant and the filling, we needed:

Eggplant and filling ingredients

- 4 baby eggplants ($4.99)

- 1/4 cup + 2 tsbp olive oil ($1.10)

- 1/2 cup water ($0)

- 1 large onion ($0.60)

- 4 garlic cloves ($0.10)

- 1 inch knob of ginger ($0.10)

- 1 large handful of parsley leaves ($0.75)

- 28 oz can of diced tomatoes ($0.99)

- 3 tsp ground cumin ($0.10)

- 2 tsp ground coriander ($0.08)

- salt to taste ($0.05)

To top the eggplant once it was done, we used:

Toppings bar

- 1/2 cup plain yogurt ($0.37)

- 1 tbsp honey ($0.15)

- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar ($0.10)

- 1 tbsp toasted pine nuts ($0.10)

- 1/2 cup finely chopped mint leaves ($0.56)

The recipe total was about $10.14. Not a cheap dinner for 2, especially considering it's vegetarian, but we do have some leftovers. 

The recipe is fairly straight-forward. Other than the baking times, I pretty much followed it as written here.

Cooking steps

The short version of the process [with my comments] is:

• Peel off some eggplant skin in stripes, cut in half lengthwise keeping the stem, scrape out eggplant insides (and reserve).
• Put eggplant in baking dish and add the water and 1/4 cup olive oil. Salt eggplant, cover tightly with foil, bake at 350 degrees. [The recipe here didn't give a time, but it was supposed to be as long as the prep/filling takes, 15 minutes they estimated in comments. This was where I baked it for at least 30 instead, first unintentionally and then intentionally trying to shorten the next baking step.]
• Run onions, garlic, ginger and parsley through food processor until finely chopped. Add to pan with 2 tbsp olive oil.  Heat and stir.
• Run tomatoes through food processor and add to mixture.
• Run eggplant through food processor and add to mixture.
• Stir mixture until it reduces by half. [It never really reduced by half, but it reduced a little bit after a very long time.]
• Add cumin, coriander, salt and cook for a few more minutes.
• Remove eggplant from oven, fill halves with filling, re-cover with foil and bake longer. [This is where the recipe said an hour but I did 30 minutes.]
• Bake without foil. [Recipe said 15 here but I did 20 minutes.]
• Cool to room temperature. [Didn't have time for that.]
• Drizzle with yogurt and pomegranate molasses. [Didn't have pomegranate molasses and was not going to go out to Queens to get it. Substituted the honey/cider vinegar mixture.] Sprinkle with toasted nuts and mint. Eat!

We really enjoyed this recipe, even if we would have preferred to eat before 11 pm. It came out well. The filling was good, and better in the eggplant halves than it was on its own. (I had leftovers after filling up the eggplant halves so we ate them as an "appetizer" topped with some shredded mozzarella. The cheese was A's suggestion to balance out the flavors, and it was a good one.) The recipe tasted healthy and fresh. The toppings really worked. I don't know how it would have tasted different with pomegranate molasses, but the honey/cider vinegar combo was good.

The finished product!

I think we would make this again. But I'm certainly not going to make the timing mistake that I made this time. I think the food processor pulsed the ingredients a little too long and I'd like them a little more whole, but that's not a major gripe. A would add more salt, but again, that's an easy fix. This was good. Writing this up, I just realized that Turkish week in the 52 week challenge comes up in a few weeks. Would have been good to make this then instead, but the eggplant would never have lasted until then. I guess I'll just have to try to master another Turkish recipe!