Greek/Turkish Stuffed Aubergine with minced Lamb and spices

Had plans for MaPo DouFu, but the minced meat was Lamb mince, slight adjustment and a dive into the cupboard and fridge to see what else was available. On the left two shiny aubergines, a jar with tiny dried bird’s eye chilli peppers, a quick look in the cupboard with jingling spice bottles. Two bell peppers from the vegetable drawer, asked hubby to snip a big hand of fresh parsley from our potted garden outside. Love Greek and Turkish cuisines and thought it would be a nice surprise after a few days of Asian dishes, with most of the ingredients at home it is easy to fuse flavours and mix with spices. Creating a new dish or cooking a flavour is most of the time not ingenuity but missing an ingredient which forces you to substitute in the hope it fuses and blends all well together. If it does happy faces at the table, if not it will be voted out not to be repeated. Luckily this dish is a keeper, easy to prepare and adapts with all most all vegetables even a spinach version turned out tasty, so go figure.

Aubergine vegetarian version

If you want an aubergine vegetarian version just omit the meat and cook the vegetables or you may add one can of chickpeas instead. After cooking and filling the eggplant shells, you will have more than enough stuffing left over to enjoy the next day either for lunch or dinner.

Variations we like for the next meal as lunch or dinner ideas are:

• Wrap in a tortilla as a burrito with extra lettuce or with rice.
• Grill Turkish/Moroccan bread/Ciabatta layer with lettuce and top with eggplant stuffing
• If you don’t have time to wait and bake the potato, zapp the spud in the microwave on full, cut a cross and pull it open top the eggplant stuffing on top with a dollop of yoghurt.
• or if you happen to have some hummus, lavash and other dips you can have it as a snack too.

Share the food! Enjoy and send me a photo of your dish 🙂