Ghiveci – eggplant in tomato sauce

It’s a simple recipe which requires few ingredients and is very tasty.

Ghiveci is national Moldavian/Romanian dish, here is simplest version of ghiveci developed by me, usually ghiveci has more ingredients varying from location to location like onion, carrot and bell pepper, but my version tries to underline the real taste of vegetables and if you’ll master this simple recipe you’ll be able to cook more complicated ones, recipes of which which I hope  will be publish on this site later.

Ingredients:

• tomatoes  – 1kg (about 2 pounds)
• eggplant (also known as aubergine) – 1.5kg (about 3 pounds)
• vegetable oil – enough to fry eggplant
• salt

(note that the ratio of tomatoes to eggplant depends on tomatoes sourness, the sourer are tomatoes the smaller quantity of tomatoes we’ll need)

So first we wash and cut our aubergines:

Then we start frying them, note that the eggplant absorbs a lot of oil during frying:

While we’re frying eggplant we’ll cut our tomatoes:

When tomatoes are cut we’ll start frying them, in traditional recipes usually first some onion is fried then tomatoes are added, but since we’re doing it simple we’ll just throw our tomatoes into a hot pan or a wok, without oil, because aubergines already have a lot of oil after frying:

Crush the tomatoes with a big spoon. Salt the tomatoes so that it will be a little over-salted, because we haven’t salted the eggplant. In about 15 minutes the sauce will be ready and then we’ll add eggplants:

We’ll stew it for about 5 minutes more and vuala it’s ready: