I’ve cooked it in the past, but of course I deviated from the original recipe. 🙂 Ä°mam bayıldı as it is called in the original language, it contains eggplant plus onion, garlic and tomatoes and a ton of olive oil (from which the imam is said to have fainted, of emotion that his wife consumed in less than 2 weeks all the oil received at the wedding, as dowries from her father).
The recipe I found in a Mediterranean recipes book said to cut the eggplant in half and bake them in the oven with some olive oil. I guess the result might be okay if you have a normal oven. Which is not mine. So I preferred to take the meat out and put in the oven only the peel with a tablespoon of oil and prepare the rest on the stove. The rest means onion and garlic, plus a carrot, plus eggplant, all finely chopped or grated; plus spices, including mint and basil, plus oil and a little water. When the shells looked ripe, I put the vegetable and tomato mixture in the broth on top, plus olive oil, and put them back in the oven.
The more oil you put, the better (or so I imagine…) but we don’t want to faint, do we? 😛 The end result turned out to be less disastrous than I expected, which shows that sometimes miracles happen in the kitchen. :))
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See here all the disasters in the kitchen.