The Priest Fainted!! <--- Sunday's Tasty Vegetarian Recipe.

A nice vegetarian dish can be a dream and if you don't agree, you need to try this one!
This Sunday I felt that eggplant was the best choice so there was only one recipe for me:

Imam Bayildi - " the priest fainted "

It's one of my favorite recipes that I did over and over again in the last 2 years until I have reached...perfection? Well, no, but some of my guests were really close to fainting.

The story behind the name of this Turkish dish is that the imam fainted when he heard that his wife used all the olive oil in the house for cooking it. I love this and I take the spirit of the story to heart: I used A LOT of olive oil!

I first ate this at a turkish restaurant in Bucharest. I loved it by couldn't persuade the cook to give me the recipes so I had to do my own reseearch.

I remember that I paid about 10$ for this at the restaurant, I now cook my own with about 2$. Depending where you live, it's gonna cost you about the same!

When I cook, I measure with my eyes, with my tastes, with my fingers so I can not give you an exact recipe but here's what I did.

I took a big eggplant, sliced it in half then sliced the meat a bit. Then, I just put olive oil on it. A LOT of it. All the olive oil in the house, right? Put it in a pan or what have you and throw it in a low-heat oven for 20 -30 minutes.

Cut, Slice, Olive Oil and in the oven with this beauty!

Meanwhile, make great sauce. The sauce is everything.
Put some olive oil[ "some" ] in a pot and sweat a onion in it, 5 minutes or so. At the end, add some chopped garlic, stir for 30 seconds and dump a can of tomatoes over it.
Time to add the spices! Go crazy, what do you like? I like spicy and savory so...
Salt, pepper, sugar [ very important], chilli peppers, fish sauce...and then add basil, oregano, paprika maybe, thyme if you have it. Don't be strict and taste as you add, you'll get there.
Let it on low for 10-20 minutes until it thickens a bit.

The perfect sauce = a bit of this, a bit of that, a can of tomato and taste often

Now, if it's been 20 minute,s take out the eggplant from the oven and stuff it with the sauce!
Just put all the sauce over the eggplants, and be careful to pus it into the slices.

THEN...you guess it, put MORE olive oil over it :D
Yeah, that's magic in the making!!

Now put it in the oven and cover it for 1 hour or more.
When it's almost flat, it's ready.
Enjoy!!