Meat-stuffed eggplant

I love cookbooks. There are so many great recipes online now that I find it hard to justify buying them, yet I most of the books I own are cookbooks. I've read about the wonders of Jerusalem: A Cookbook on 101 Cookbooks and Smitten Kitchen. When I found this recipe for lamb-stuffed eggplant on Serious Eats, I unearthed a tube of ground lamb from my freezer so that I could try it out for myself.

Roasting the eggplant transforms an everyday vegetable into velvet decadence. And then you stuff it with lamb! I worked on this as a nighttime kitchen project, what I do after I eat dinner when I have a recipe that is too time consuming for a weeknight.

One tip: Thoroughly read a recipe before trying to make it for the first time. Sometimes this process goes awry when I try to cook things at 10pm. I definitely screwed up the sauce (no water! oops!), so I'll omit it here since I thought the eggplant came out quite nicely in spite of this misstep. But following the original recipe would probably be even more luxurious.

If you don't have lamb around, any ground meat could be worked into this recipe, though the mixture may require additional seasoning since lamb has a pretty strong and distinct flavor. Maybe even seitan? I don't really know how that stuff works, but go for it!

Meat-stuffed eggplant
Adapted from Jerusalem: A Cookbook, via Serious Eats

Time: ~2 hours
Servings: 8 small, 4 large

Ingredients
4 eggplants, sliced lengthwise into 8 halves
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 heaping teaspoon smoked paprika
1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon
2 onions, diced
1 pound ground lamb (or another ground meat)
2 teaspoons tomato paste
1/2 cup cashews, chopped (the recipe calls for pine nuts, so chop to about that size)
Large handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Small handful of mint, chopped
2 big sprigs of rosemary, chopped
4 sprigs of thyme (remove leaves from stems)

Method
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

2. In a large roasting pan, lay your eggplant halves cut-side facing up. Drizzle the eggplant with olive oil and gently rub into the flesh (or you use a brush, but why wash another thing?). Season with salt and pepper and roast for about 20 minutes. Your eggplant will be golden brown and velvety. 

3. Turn the oven temperature down to 375 degrees when you take out the eggplant. Make a dent in each eggplant half with the back of the spoon -- this will create a cavity for the meat.

4. Meanwhile, get started on the stuffing. In a small bowl, put together a spice mix: cumin, paprika, and cinnamon.

5. Coat a pan with olive oil and bring up to medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the onions and the spice mix to the pan. Stir frequently and cook for about 8 minutes.

6. Add the lamb, herbs, and nuts to the pan, along with 1 teaspoon of salt and a few shakes of pepper. Stir often and cook for about 8 minutes until the meat is cooked. The paprika makes it a bit hard to tell when the pink is gone, but the meat will continue cooking in the oven so don't worry too much.

7. Spoon the stuffing into the eggplant halves. Cover your roasting pan tightly with tin foil (be careful -- your pan might still be hot). Return to the oven and roast for 90 minutes.