roasted eggplant with yogurt-tahini sauce and cumin-crisped chickpeas, p.146

"This is an interesting dish,"  says Kathy as she came home late from a church meeting to eat our newest venture into the cookbook. 

A week ago, Ginger bought the ingredients for this dish and we never got around to making it while she was here. She has returned to Ohio for a few weeks. This morning before she left, she roasted a pork roast for us to eat. So, we sliced that up and ate it with our eggplant. It was delicious!

Back to the eggplant. The recipe was pretty straightforward. I made the chickpeas as suggested. They are yummy and I would eat them as a snack (and have been all night!).

We had two regular eggplant (too large for the recipe, so I sliced them in thirds) and three skinny Japanese eggplant. I thought the bigger eggplant would take longer, so I baked them alone for 15 minutes first, then added the smaller eggplant. At the end of the baking time (45 minutes for the large and 30 minutes for the small), I thought they still lacked color, so I broiled them for a couple of minutes on the top side. 

I made the sauce as suggested, but wasn't careful with the lemon and it has been suggested by the diners (not me!) that it was too lemony and covered up the eggplant taste. Vaden would like to taste the eggplant more and the sauce was potent. Maybe less sauce or less lemon would help that. 

You can see it was a pretty dish to serve. I don't think I would want it as my only main dish, but as a side dish it was great. If I served it as a main, I would likely include rice and a salad or two (eggplants call for tomatoes, so a fresh tomato salad would be great with this dish).