The Imam falls into the stew

Ingredients for 4 servings:

• 1 kg eggplant(s)
• ½ kg tomatoes
• ½ kg onion(s)
• 1 bulb(s) garlic
• olive oil
• ½ liter vegetable broth
• Salt
• pepper
• possibly tomato paste

Instructions

Working time approx. 30 minutes; Cooking/baking time approx. 1 hour; Total time approx. 1 hour 30 minutes

Imam Bayildi as a stew – variation

Cut the eggplant into strips about the length and thickness of a finger and fry them briefly on both sides in a pan in olive oil. Then fry the diced onions in a large saucepan and add the eggplant, diced tomatoes, and the garlic cloves from one head of garlic (if you’re not a big fan of garlic, use restraint here). The cloves aren’t peeled, but added with the skin on! Later, you can “suck” the garlic out of its skin like a Bavarian white sausage. It also saves you a lot of fiddly peeling work… Then add about 0.5 liters of vegetable broth and a little salt and pepper. Simmer the whole thing for at least half an hour, preferably a whole hour, adding a little water/broth if needed. If the tomatoes aren’t very aromatic, you can also add a little tomato paste. The frying of the eggplant and onions should make the dish oily enough; if not, simply add an extra splash of olive oil. Tastes best both hot and cold, and of course with Arabic bread. Imam Bayildi is originally a Turkish dish, but is also very popular in most Arab countries. Translated, it means “The Imam Fainted,” and the story (at least one version among others) goes like this: a man spontaneously invited the Imam to his home for dinner after visiting the mosque. His poor wife was completely unprepared and didn’t really have many supplies in the house. So she improvised and made eggplants stuffed with tomatoes, onions, and garlic. The Imam loved it. In one version of the story, he faints simply because of the sensational taste of this dish; in another, he stuffs his stomach so full of the delicious eggplants that the sheer amount of food in his stomach causes him to faint. One thing is certain: it was delicious! I haven’t had anyone faint (thankfully) yet, but my version was delicious too: it basically consists of the same ingredients as the classic Imam Bayildi, but instead of stuffing the eggplants, I mix all the ingredients into a kind of stew. The idea came about because I didn’t have an oven and only had one gas cylinder available.