The dish I made for South Sudan tasted a lot better than it looks. It's a "salad" made from eggplant and peanut butter. Unfortunately I didn't take the best pictures--I didn't put any green herbs on top to make it pretty, I didn't have any bread or rice to eat it with, etc. But it was still really good and definitely hit the spot.
Salata aswad means "black salad" in Arabic, the black part probably just referring to the color of the eggplant. I found it to be more like a stew than a salad, but I can see how you could make it more like a hot salad by sauteing the eggplant rather than roasting until soft. The recipe I used said to fry the eggplant until mostly soft, but I didn't want to use excess oil so I decided to just roast it.
Then you saute onions and add tomato paste, garlic, and water to make a tomato sauce. Once that's cooked a few minutes you add the eggplant.
You let that cook, covered, until the eggplant is completely soft. At that point you can easily mash it all up with a wooden spoon to a smooth consistency.
Then, you add a couple tablespoons of peanut butter to give it a nice, creamy consistency.
Then, some seasonings: cumin and black pepper. Cayenne or chili powder or some kind of curry powder would probably go great in this. A squeeze of lime juice adds some freshness and deepens the flavors.
Once it's all done it's a nice soft consistency, like a looser baba ganoush. The recipe I followed was actually a youtube video, and at the end the person cooking enjoyed hers with some pita bread, cheese, and herbs, which looked great. It definitely could have used some kind of starch as the vehicle. It's meant to be more of a side dish, but it was perfectly fine standing on its own!
Recipes Used: Eggplant Salad
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