Vegan Recipe of the Month: Mujadara with Fried Eggplant and Red Peppers

Since I first started my Veggie of the Month experiment back in 2013, I've found ideas for new recipes to try in a variety of places. Some came from cookbooks, some from newspapers and magazines, some from the back of a food package, and some from blogs and other sites online. And, of course, there are some that Brian just made up himself or heavily modified. But this month's is the first I can ever remember learning about on a TV show.



Since the pandemic started, Brian and I have been watching a lot of Netflix (especially during the first four months, when we were without our beloved Critical Role), and one of our favorite shows is "Queer Eye." This is a remake of the early-2000s series originally named "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," in which each week a team of five gay men would do a whole-life makeover on some poor schlub who didn't know how to dress right, eat right, fix his hair, decorate his home, or interact with people. In the current version, the new "Fab Five" do makeovers not just for straight guys, but for women and gay men as well. And in the last episode we watched, the "hero" (as the Fab Five call their clients) was an eighteen-year-old  activist spending her gap year before college working for an environmental organization in Philadelphia. She lived with several of her coworkers in a group house owned by the organization, and they all took turns cooking for the whole group — always a vegan meal.

I was curious to see how Antoni, the Fab Five's food expert, would rise to this challenge, since he's a devoted lover of meat, cheese, and butter. But he handled it with aplomb, presenting a vegan dish featuring a base of lentils and rice topped with a savory eggplant-and-pepper combo. The cooking of the eggplant struck us as particularly interesting: he sliced it thin, salted it to remove some of the moisture, and then fried it until it was browned. At the time we saw this, we already had an eggplant in the fridge, and Brian was so intrigued by this new way of cooking it that he decided to scrap his original plans for it and try to find the recipe for this dish instead.

After hunting around on the fan forums for the show, he found links to not one but two separate recipes. The lentil-rice base, which he found at Cookie + Kate, turned out to be a Middle Eastern dish known as mujadara, spiced with cumin, garlic, and bay leaf and topped with crispy fried onions. (If he'd had any doubts about making this recipe, that last ingredient definitely erased them.) The eggplant topping appeared at Food & Wine under the name "Tangy Twice-Cooked Eggplants with Red Peppers"; it featured onion, garlic, smoked paprika, and a generous splash of fresh lemon juice. Since the eggplant we had was about big enough to do a half batch of the second dish, he did a half batch of the first to go with it.

As usual, he ended up making some modifications to these recipes. For the mujadara, he had to substitute white rice for the brown rice, which we didn't have (I know, we're pathetic excuses for vegetarians). He left out the green onions and cilantro, which seemed like unnecessary fillips given that we were going to be topping this with the eggplant-pepper mixture. And rather than cook the lentils and rice together on the stovetop as recommended, he saved some time by doing them in the pressure cooker. He did the lentils on their own for 15 minutes, drained off the excess water, added fresh water along with the rice and seasonings, and cooked it all together for 6 minutes more.

For the eggplant dish, the changes were even simpler. For a half recipe, he replaced the large Spanish onion with a small yellow onion, substituted red wine vinegar for the sherry vinegar, and used plain salt in place of kosher salt. Everything else he did as instructed — slicing and salting the eggplant, letting it sit for an hour, frying it and draining it, then cooking the other veggies separately with a touch of smoked paprika before adding the eggplant into the pan and spiking it with the vinegar and lemon juice.

Here you see the final result: the lentils and rice topped with crispy onions in one bowl, the eggplant and peppers in another. Together, they made an exceedingly flavorful combo, though I found it just a trifle unbalanced. The lemon and vinegar in the eggplant make the flavor very tart, and I thought that brightness overwhelmed the subtler flavors of the onion, garlic, and smoked paprika. Without the lentil-and-rice mixture underneath it for ballast, I would definitely have found this dish overpowering. However, the texture of the eggplant was lovely, crisp on the outside and meltingly tender on the inside.

Would we make it again? Personally, I’m not sure it was good enough to be worth the trouble. These two dishes together have a lot of parts and a particularly long lead time, which means a very late dinner if you cook it on a weeknight. But Brian pointed out that you could cut this down by setting up the eggplant in the morning and returning to drain it and fry it in the evening (and possibly prepping the other veggies at the same time). Personally, I would be more interested in using this method for preparing eggplant to serve in some other way, since the texture of the eggplant was my favorite part. But Brian really liked the entire combo, and if he thinks it’s worth the effort to make it again, I’m okay with that. Or, if he wants to make just one or the other of these dishes (serving the eggplant over plain rice or quinoa, or the mujadara with a green veggie), that would be fine too.