Pinday: Stuffed Eggplant Rolls

It seems like all the Pinterest recipes I'm featuring on here are vegetarian, but those are the new recipes I'm trying these days!  So here's another vegetarian hit: Stuffed Eggplant Rolls! The pin is here, and the recipe is here.  Below is my picture and original recipe.

Stuffed Aubergine Rolls 

Ingredients

• 2 aubergines, cut lengthways into 0.5cm/¼ in thick strips
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• olive oil, for brushing

For the filling

• 150g/5oz ricotta
• 150g/5oz buffalo mozzarella
• pinch freshly grated nutmeg
• 2 spring onions, finely chopped

For the sauce

• 250ml/8fl oz extra virgin olive oil
• 450g/1lb cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• pinch sugar
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation method 

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/355F/Gas 4.
2. Season the aubergine slices well with salt and freshly ground black pepper and brush with oil.
3. Griddle for a couple of minutes on each side in a hot griddle pan, or until golden-brown grill marks are formed. Remove from the pan and drain on kitchen paper.
4. For the filling, mix the ricotta, mozzarella, nutmeg and spring onions together in a bowl.
5. Lay out all of the slices of aubergine onto a clean surface. Place about one teaspoon of filling at the bottom edge of each one.
6. Roll up the aubergine slices, like a cigar, around the filling, then rest them seam-side down on a plate.
7. For the sauce, heat the olive oil in a pan and add the cherry tomatoes.
8. Simmer for 8-10 minutes until the tomatoes begin to break down.
9. Remove from the heat and stir in the garlic and sugar. Season, to taste, with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
10. Spoon some of the sauce into the bottom of an ovenproof dish.
11. Carefully place the aubergine rolls, seam-side down onto the sauce, and spoon over the rest of the sauce.
12. Transfer to the oven and bake for 12-15 minutes, until the cheese begins to melt.
13. To serve, spoon the rolls onto plates.

The recipe came from a BBC site, where they call eggplants "aubergines!"  There were also a few other British words in the recipe that I just did the best I could to interpret and do correctly.  I don't know what spring onions are, but I just diced half a regular onion and sauteed it a little before mixing it with the cheese.  I also left out the nutmeg because I thought that sounded weird.  :)  Finally, I just used prepared spaghetti sauce to top them instead of making my own with cherry tomatoes.  Big time saver there!

These were delicious, although they took longer to make than I expected.  I used my Pampered Chef grill pan to grill them, and that worked great, just took a long time since it only held 4 or 5 slices at a time.  (I also used olive oil cooking spray instead of brushing the slices with olive oil, but I DO NOT recommend doing that...  The spray ended up burning onto my grill pan and being very difficult to get off!)  The grilled eggplant was very tasty, though, and I bet at some point I'll just make grilled eggplant as a vegetable side dish!

So this one was very tasty, but a bit too much effort to make all the time.  A nice special treat for my eggplant-loving husband, though!

I served them with Oven Roasted Garlic Green Beans, which were delicious, but for us needed to be cooked longer than the 8 minutes the recipe calls for.  Next time I'll probably do like 15 minutes, which I bet would be just right for us!