If you grow aubergines you need to know a lot of recipes. Even a few plants will produce a several-kilo harvest. When I was living in Saudi Arabia, I was friends with a gardener who managed a lot of private gardens at the weekend, as a side-line to his usual job with the municipality. Actually, Abdul Malik had a lot of side-lines, all inter-connected, and most fairly dodgy. One strand of shady business involved aubergines and here's roughly how it went. The guys down at the government plant nursery would plant up an extra few seedlings in every box and sell them to Malik, who would then sell them on to the home owners whose gardens he managed, at a hugely inflated price while also charging them for the work of planting the seedlings and tending them over the subsequent growing season. When harvest time came, the home owners found themselves with sacks and sacks of aubergines which they had paid Malik to harvest. They would then pay him a little more to dispose of the majority of the aubergines however he saw fit. Malik would stash the aubergines with a trusted friend and hawk a basket or two round the camp every day until they were gone. Then the next lot would arrive....
As the trusted friend in question, I received as my cut of the deal as many aubergines as I could shake a stick at. My next door neighbour, Imran, sorted me with my first aubergine recipe and I named it after him, but I soon realised that I would need a lot more if I was not to suffer aubergine fatigue. This is one of the large collection of aubergine recipes I've built up.
Fried aubergines are great but they can soak up a lot of oil. In this recipe we dry fry the aubergine and add a little oil as a salad dressing. I think this produces a salad with less calories. By omitting the oil altogether and adding a little lemon juice instead, you get a delicious fat-fee salad.
Slice the aubergine longways and lay the slices in a hot frying pan without oil. Turn the slices after two or three minutes. The slices should be browned when they're ready. Chop the tomatoes, garlic and coriander and cut the cooked aubergine slices into strips. Mix all the ingredients together and serve.