Ever since the work-from-home has started, I have been trying a lot of new curry recipes that are easy to cook and are budget friendly. I am sure many of us have been doing this a lot. We buy vegetables for ten days and stretch whatever we have and utilize everything we have. Since it is slowly moving into summers, the chance of spoilage is high so it becomes even more imperative to cook everything and finish, before it lands up in trash. I have been noticing that a lot of my curry recipes and easy baking recipes have been doing extremely well, and hence I thought, why not share three back-to-back easy curry recipes that all of you can incorporate into your daily cooking, or maybe as a different menu, but with pantry ingredients. So let me start off with this Borani Baingan…
I am sure like me, many aren’t very fond of this vegetable called eggplants or aubergines or brinjal. 😀 Even though I buy it into my pantry all the time, somehow it gets thrown into a parippu curry or just turned into a stiry fry. If you ask me if there are any particular dishes that made me reconsider my relationship with this vegetable, then it has to be the Batu Moju. This dish was a real revelation. It was so delicious that I am considering making it again very soon when I make some nice spicy biriyani. Another dish that I love with this vegetable is the Moutabbel. Let me add the dish of today to this list… 🙂
Borani Banjan is an Afghani dish with fried eggplants, tossed in a tomato laden sauce and then topped with a garlicky yogurt on top. If it smells like Cilmir to you, then it is OK. Only the yogurt is the common factor, nothing else. 😀 I have been eyeing this dish for many years now, but never got a chance to make it till recently. Since I have my sister-in-law with me, she encourages me to try new dishes and I am now slowly getting into the mood of trying new dishes whenever I can. So the first one I wanted to tick off what this interesting dish and so glad that I got to try it sooner than later…
The dish is very easy to make. The eggplants are fried till almost done. It is usually deep fried, but then I just ended up shallow frying it. The onion and tomato masala is made and then the fried eggplants are tossed into it. While this process happens, we just mix up the yogurt and keep it aside for the flavors to go a bit deep. While serving, the hot eggplant sauce is topped with the cold yogurt on top. We actually wanted to eat this with the thin Tandoori naan we get from the bakery close by but that night, there was a heavy rain that lashed out from nowhere, so we had to settle down to eat it with khuboos. Nonetheless, it tasted amazing! The sauce mingled so beautifully with the yogurt and was very light on the tummy. Having tried a few Afghani recipes earlier like this Shinwari Karahi and this pulao, I am sure that this cuisine is surely easy to cook and truly flavorful as well… Off to this recipe…
Borani Baingan
Ingredients
- 400 gm eggplants
- Olive oil as needed
- 4 cloves garlic crushed
- 1 large onion sliced
- 1/2 tsp turmeric powder
- 1/4 tsp red chilli powder
- 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
- 2 large tomatoes chopped
- Salt to taste
- FOR YOGURT:
- 3/4 cup yogurt
- 15-20 green mint leaves minced
- 3 cloves garlic minced
- Salt to taste
Instructions
- Whisk togetber all the ingredients under "for yogurt" and set aside till use. The more it sits, the better the flavors.
- Slice the brinjal into roundrels of the same thickness. Soak in some salted warm water. Drain and set aside.
- Heat the olive oil in a pan. Fry the eggplants till almost done. Drain and set aside.
- In the same pan - add more oil as needed, fry the crushed garlic.Add the onion and saute till wilted.
- Add the spice powders and fry for a minute.
- Add the tomatoes and cook till completely mashed. Sprinkle water to avoid sticking to the bottom.
- Add the fried eggplants and toss well. Adjust seasoning and switch off.
- For serving, transfer the eggplants masala into a plate. Spread the yogurt on top. Dig in with a huge peice of naan!