For the last month or so, I have been getting fresh picked vegetables from my in law's summer garden. Purple broad beans, Chinese long bean, beautiful eggplants, sweet red tomatoes, super hot green chillies and bitter gourd. It's a pretty humid day today, so I decided to make a cold salad. Roasted eggplant drinks up all the flavors in the dressing, and the tomatoes are an explosion of flavor when you bite into them. I had some leftover blue cheese from Salt Spring Island, so I threw some of that in as well, but you don't have to add cheese if you don't want to. I also bought some really nice, local BC garlic, and I roasted up one of those to spread over some fresh sourdough rye. Yum, yum, yum, I hope my husband speeds up his run so that we can eat!!This salad will taste even better tomorrow once all the ingredients have melded.
Ingredients:
1 medium eggplant
2 large, fresh tomatoes, diced
a cup of cooked lentils (de puy if you have them, otherwise standard green lentil is fine)
3 green onions, diced
handful of fresh basil, roughly chopped
1/4 cup of either feta or blue cheese (optional)
5 tbsp of good extra virgin olive oil ( I really like Grezzo)
half of a vidalia onion, thinly sliced
juice from half of a lemon
dash of salt
fresh ground pepper
Directions:
1. Cut the eggplant in half lengthwise, and rub a little bit of olive oil all over the flesh side.2. Place on a cookie sheet face down, for about 20 minutes in a 400 degree oven. You know it's ready when it's all wrinkled and it pierces with a fork very easily. If you are also roasting garlic, slice a bit of the top off, pour about a tablespoon of olive oil so that it gets all over the inside cloves, and throw it in with the eggplant.
3. When the eggplant is ready, scoop out all the flesh, discard the skin and roughly chop up the flesh.
4. Throw it into a bowl with all other ingredients and enjoy! It's as easy as that!
You know you have some good garlic on your hands when the sugars start oozing out of it as it bakes...mmmm....
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