Cook with Us #13 ~ Eggplant casserole with cauliflower rice 🍆🍚

This will be my first time entering the @cookwithus contest run by @chefsteve , @pandamama and @offoodandart. It's a great honor and a big pleasure for me. The main reason I am contributing this week is that the theme is perfect for me: a vegan dish. I cook this way every day anyway ... 😄

Nevertheless it was a bit tricky to find a perfect combination. The hubby is trying to loose stomach scope and is on a low carb/fat/sugar but high in protein diet for about a week now. For my part I should eat en carbs to not to loose weight! You guess it right that this is a real challenge for my cooking skills. And that's how I solved it this time ...

We bought this beautiful eggplants and a fresh cauliflower and I cooked a wonderful low carb, fat and no sugar eggplant casserole with minced soy and a tomato sauce with an oriental touch.

Ingredients:

• one cauliflower
• 500g eggplants 
• one onion
• two gloves of garlic 
• two or three fresh tomatoes 
• a can of chopped tomatoes 
• some pureed tomatoes
• some dry soy flakes (to add enough protein to the dish and a meaty texture ) 
• some vegetable broth
• two teaspoons of ground Omani Masala (a mixture of hot chilies, ginger, cloves, coriander, cardamom, black pepper, and cumin)
• fresh parsley and chives

Preparation:

First I prepared the minced soy flakes. That's a very easy step. I just needed to cover them with boiling vegetable broth.

Next step was to prepare the cauliflower. It's better to buy a pretty beautiful, clean and white, maybe organic cauliflower so I don't need to wash it. I don't want so much extra water betwen my cauliflower "grains". I divided the cauliflower into florets small enough to fit into my tiny food processor. I shredded the cauliflower in small portions untill it looked like rice grains. It took a while but worked pretty fine. I didn't know what to expect because I've never done this before. I was glad I didn't had to shred it by hand with the grater because this would have been a real mess ...

I guess, the bigger the food processor the easier is this step. I set the raw cauliflower rice aside and continued with the sauce...

I cut the eggplants into one centimeter slices, the tomatoes into pieces and the onion and the garlic into small cubes.

I had heard about "frying" with water and I thought to try it this time to avoid any extra oil in my dish. I put the onions and the garlic in a coated pot and when it was hot and starting to fry I added a tiny bit of water. I think the secret is to stir all the time and to add some extra water if necessary.

When the onions turned lucent I added the eggplants, the Omani Masala and some salt, stirred and covered with cooking water. I let cook until the eggplants where soft.

Then I added the chopped canned and the pureed tomatoes, the soy "meat", the fresh tomatoes and the chopped fresh herbs and let it simmer on low heat while I moved back to my cauliflower rice ... 

This was a very easy step. I heated a coated pan and stir-"fried" the cauliflower grains again with a little bit of water. That doesn't ake long. I still wanted them "al dente" but not completely raw. If you don't cook low fat you can add some coconut oil or any other high olaic oil to fry the "rice". I only seasoned with a dash of salt.

Ready to serve was my low in carbs and fat but still very comforting and satisfying dish. We both were really happy about the result (after I added some slices of cooked potatoes from yesterday to my sauce ... 😜). 

I hope you liked this recipe and I would be happy if this was inspiring to try to cook with less carbs or oil every now and then. ☀️ I am looking forward to to read your thoughts and suggestions. Thank you in advance for your support! 😘

Aaah! By the way - I didn't need the whole bowl of cauliflower rice. The rest went into a box and into the freezer - so I save this step of preparation next time ... 😉.