In this recipe we will show how to make a popular Georgian family dish of eggplant with walnuts and spices. This is primarily a summer dish and is served cold. Our version is quite spicy so you may want to reduce the quantities of spices or omit them.
Ingredients: 500 grams of eggplants, 250 grams of walnuts, 1 tsp dried Blue Fenugreek, 1 tsp of dried coriander, 1 tsp of paprika, 1 tsp dried marigold, 3 cloves of garlic, 3 tbs of white wine vinegar, salt and 100 ml of oil.
Preparation: Crush the walnuts and garlic together. It is common in Georgia to further crush the nuts with the back of a spoon to extract the walnut oil. The oil is later used to dress the prepared dish. It is quite a strenuous process and we did not do it for this recipe.
Add the crushed walnuts and garlic to a mixing bowl and add the spices, salt, vinegar and 3-4 tbs of water.
Mix thoroughly until the mixture looks like the picture below.
Slice each eggplant length ways into 4 or 5 pieces.
Add oil to a pan and fry the eggplant on a medium heat until cooked on both sides.
Remove eggplant from the pan and use kitchen paper to absorb excess oil. Spread the walnut mixture onto each slice of eggplant.
Spread more walnut mixture onto the top of each folded eggplant.
Serving: Serve cold. We garnished ours with parsley but pomegranate seeds are more traditional and sprinkled on top of each eggplant.
Enjoy your eggplant with walnuts and spices!
I love eggplant and you Georgians find such unique ways to make eating vegetarian interesting.