Ingredients:
For the meatballs
1 lb ground beef (original recipe is with ground lamb so it is up to you)
1 onion grated
2 garlic cloves grated
1 cup bread crumbs
1 egg
¼ cup of chopped parsley
To season: cumin, black pepper, red pepper, salt
Combine everything in a large bowl, set it to the side for half an hour in the fridge. Then form it into round balls like meatballs. It will be about 15 balls altogether. Deep fry the meatballs in vegetable/olive oil. Don’t worry about cooking them through because we will also bake them further in the oven.
3 eggplants
10 cherry tomatoes
5 green peppers
Tooth picks
For the sauce:
2 grated tomatoes
1 garlic clove (chopped)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tbsp olive oil
1 ½ cup hot water
1 tsp thyme
Peel the eggplants in vertical stripes, then slice them vertically on a cutting board roughly ¼ inch thick. Put them into a large container, sprinkle salt on them and fill the container with water. Put a heavy plate on the top so that eggplants don’t float on the top of the water. Set them to the side for 20 minutes. Then rinse them and dry them with a kitchen towel.
Put a parchment paper on a tray and place eggplant slices side by side on the tray. Then brush both sides of each slice with olive oil. Bake them in the oven at 450F for about 15 minutes. Remove them from the oven.
Take two pieces of eggplant and place them like a cross sign, put the meatball in the center and fold the eggplant around it as you see in the video. Put a half of a cherry tomato and a piece of green pepper on a tooth pick and then stick it into eggplant meatball package. Place them all in an ovenproof dish.
For the sauce; put one tbsp of olive oil in a pan, add the chopped garlic cloves and the grated tomatoes and sauté them till the juice of tomatoes evaporate. Then add the tomato paste, stir everything together, add thyme and 1 ½ cups of hot water. Mix everything together and boil them to combine it all for a minute and spoon it over your eggplant meatball dish.
Bake it in the oven for half an hour minutes at 400F. Serve it with rice.
Afiyet Olsun.
16 окт 2024
