Stuffed baby aubergines..

I have read and drooled over so many recipes for stuffed baby aubergines, so many of my fellow bloggers have made them and posted them, and every time I’ve wished I could reach in and eat them off the screen. I’ve wanted to try them for so long but have had a little nagging fear that they might be difficult to make…! If not difficult, then maybe fiddly?! 

Last week it was time to jump into the breach and give it a go…the only issue being, which recipe to choose???

There’s recipes from Prachi, Shailja, Naina, Chitra, Sonal and this one that I came across, to name a few (apologies for those I missed, I tried to remember everyone’s!) and the majority of them feature the stuffing including peanuts, coconut and spices. 

Basically, you make the stuffing part of the recipe, which creates a paste; cut into the baby aubergines, but not all the way through; then ‘stuff’ them with the paste…

  You’d think the stuffing would fall out, but it doesn’t. You’d also think that it’s fiddly work, and it is a bit, but it’s not as fiddly as I thought it was going to be.   

You can pretty much prise open the baby aubergine, spoon some of the paste, then squeeze it into the cracks..that will make more sense if you try it out! 

Once they’re all filled, you microwave the stuffed aubergines for a few minutes, then cook them. I chose to roast mine, rather than pan cook. Some of the recipes include a sauce and some don’t; this one did..

  Not so pretty once they cooked maybe, but…OMG! They taste so good!!!!!! Why did I wait so long to make them?!

And even better the next day 🙂

One recipe stood out as slightly different from the rest, which was Sonal’s recipe; Sonals is a Punjabi version of stuffed baby aubergines passed down to her by her Mother. 

 In Sonal’s recipe, the stuffing is made of simply onion blended with spices to make the stuffing paste, hence the colour difference. 

I roasted these again, drizzled with a little oil..

  
It tasted equally good thing, and again was even better the next day. Where there was extra stuffing that cooked in the bottom of the pot it was good just on its own. 

I will definitely be making more stuffed baby aubergines, I plan to work through everyone’s recipes with their slight variations, and probably stuff anything else that I think might work too. 

So, the moral of the story is: get stuffing!!! It’s worth it 🙂  

  (The beauty of the stalks is that you can just pick them up and snack on them like lollies!!) 

(Yes…I did!) 

PS warning..more aubergine recipes are on their way…it’s been an aubergine party in my kitchen recently!