What makes you home sick? Yesterday I was watching the Netflix show Chef’s Table, specifically, the episode featuring Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren. I don’t know whether it was the music that plays at all the right moments synchronized with amazing cinematography or all the familiar sights and sounds emanating from the TV screen, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably at every sight of food. And this is the third time I have seen that episode so I knew exactly what was coming. After watching Chef’s Table all I could think about was how much I missed eggplant kebab so I found myself in the kitchen making this for dinner.

Every summer I spent with my grandparents in Alanya I secretly wished my grandma would make some eggplant kebab. It was not her most popular dish compared to her manti or her dolmas but to me it was special. She generally made it right after we harvest some fresh eggplants from the garden. I modified her recipe a bit and converted it from the stovetop to the oven but at its core, it is still the same dish. I know eggplant season is technically over and everyone moved onto pumpkin, cranberries and turkey but if you get tired of all the Thanksgiving food, try this eggplant kebab for a change and I promise you will be coming back for more.

Tips:

I prefer using skinny and long eggplants for this dish. The really big and plump eggplants result in very large slices and they don’t fit into the baking pan.

Pair this dish with some buttery rice pilaf.

Yields: 6 servings Time: 1hr 30 minutes

Ingredients

3 medium sized eggplants

For the meatballs:

1 lbs lean ground beef

1/4 cup breadcrumbs

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

1 cup onion, grated

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon marash or aleppo pepper

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

For the sauce:

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 tomato, chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1 cup water

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400F.

2. Wash the eggplants and peel them in alternating stripes. You can also leave them unpeeled, completely up to you.

3. Fill a bowl with cold water and add 1 tablespoon of salt. Mix to dissolve the salt. Slice the eggplants in 1/2 inch rounds and transfer them to the bowl with salt-water. Soak eggplants while preparing the meatballs. Salt-water reduced the bitterness of the eggplants and avoids browning.

4. In a separate bowl, combine ground beef, breadcrumbs, parsley, grated onion, minced garlic cloves, cumin, marash pepper, salt and black pepper. Mix the ingredients until everything is incorporated nicely.

5. Using your hands, make flat meatballs that have roughly the same diameter as the eggplant slices. You should aim to have 35-40 meatballs.

6. In a 9 inch round cake pan, arrange the slices of eggplants and meatballs in alternating order, one eggplant slice followed by one meatball. Once you complete the outermost ring, move inwards and repeat until the whole pan is full. If there is a small gap in the center, you can fill it with a tomato slice.

7. In a pan over low heat, mix tomato paste, chopped tomato, water, salt and pepper until tomato paste dissolves. Pour to sauce over the eggplants and meatballs.

8. Bake for 50-60 minutes until the eggplants are soft and meatballs are cooked-through.

Enjoy!