Salad days

A lovely sunny bank holiday weekend - I can't remember it being so warm in April.

A is for Aubergine

"The aubergine seduces. No other vegetable can offer flesh so soft, silken and tender.You don't so much chew an aubergine as let it dissolve on your tongue."  

Nigel Slater, Tender Vol I, p. 39 

A new global food store has opened up just opposite to where I work. It has a wide array of middle eastern products as well as pulses and spices and I intend to supplement my weekly organic veg box with some of the  produce they sell. I love the large bunches of coriander and flat leaf parsley, such a contrast to the plastic packaged supermarket trimmings.

I saw these aubergines and immediately thought of a recipe I had read in Yotam Ottolenghi's "Plenty", a book I received as a present last Christmas. I have long enjoyed his weekly column in the Guardian newspaper.

The recipe for burnt aubergine with tahini can be found on his blog here. I made it as a salad with cucumber and tomatoes and very good it was too.

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to encourage myself to try new recipes from cookbooks I already own.