Baked Potato with Eggplant

When you are hungry and want to fix a quick meal, I would go for this recipe, which is easy to prepare and you can fix it less than 30 minutes!! I usually bake meat and fish- recently tried the same thing with veggies. Nowadays I bake most of the veggies instead of doing it on a stove top. It saves a lot of time, less oil, and I can cook some other dish in the stove top. This goes for the people who does multitasking and who are lazy to cook!! just like me...ha ha

Method

• Pre-heat the oven to 400°F.
  

• Cut the potatoes and egg plants length wise with a knife or by using a Mandolins Slicer. Arrange the potatoes alone evenly in a microwave safe dish and cook for one minute.
  

• Take an oven safe dish and brush the pan with olive oil, place the potatoes and egg plants and bake for 10 minutes. Once done, take it out and allow them to cool for few minutes. Mix the cut veggies with 1 tbsp olive oil, red chili powder, garlic powder, salt, and ¼ tsp turmeric. You can add spices according to your taste.
  

• Preheat the broiler, Place the veggies about 4 inches from the broiler and cook until golden brown, this should take less than 5 to 10 minutes. Watch carefully, as it may take only couple minutes to cook. I remove the pan in between to turn the veggies over for more crispness on all sides.
  

Serve with rice or chapattis :)

Notes:
Pototoes need more time to bake, so I cooked in microwave for 1 minute and baked them, if you are baking only pototoes you can avoid the microwave step and bake for 15 minutes.

Potato & Peas Cups

What should I call this Snack? Mini Puffs? Samosa? When I served this dish to my hubby this evening he asked me for the recipe name. I told him different names and he was confused and didn’t bother to ask me more about it and ate the snack quitely. So I quickly went and took the Puff pastry from the freezer and saw the recipe name; it had the recipe for Chocolate peanut butter cups and I replaced them as Potato- Peas cups. So that’s how I came up with this name. I just followed the instruction of the pack and just changed the filling. I served this with sweet and sour chutney. Here goes the recipe!!!

For Filling

• Mash 1 boiled potato with ¼ cup frozen green peas, 1tsp garam masala, 1tsp of crushed cumin and coriander seeds, and salt. You can add any filling of your choice.
  

Method

• Thaw the pastry sheet at room temperature for 30-40 min. Preheat oven to 400°F. I used Pepperidge farm puff pastry sheets.

• Unfold pastry sheet on lightly floured surface. Cut the pastry sheets into squares about 3 inches. Press squares into bottoms of muffin-pan cups.

• Place about 1 tbsp. filling in center of each squares and bake 15-18 min or until it turns into a golden color.
  

Sweet and Sour Chutney

• Heat pan with ½ cup of water; add ½ -1 tsp tamarind paste, 5-6 finely chopped dates, ¼ tsp salt, and 3-4 tsp jaggery or brown sugar. Boil them until it reduces to a semi-thick paste. Allow them to cool.

• Grind the paste with few cilantro, few mint leaves, and 4-5 green chilies. Add water, salt, and sugar according to your taste.

This chutney can be served for any snack. You can use this for bhel puri

See fellow bloggers recipes using pastry sheets: Samosas, Vegetable Puffs, Vegetable puff.