Indian Eggplant with Spicy Tomato Sauce

Last week I had a rare opportunity to attend our local Thursday Farmers Market. I was thrilled to find a vendor with tiny Indian eggplants (shown above). I couldn't resist buying them, but then, as often happens, I found myself with an ingredient that was at it's prime without a specific dish planned.

No way was I letting these tiny eggplants pass me by. So I searched one of my favorite newer cookbooks, India's Vegetarian Cooking: A Regional Guide and prepared the recipe for Eggplants and Potatoes with Peanut Sauce:

While the dish was delicious, I think there may have been a typo in the recipe which called for only 2 teaspoons of ground peanuts with a sauce of a 14 oz tomatoes. Although the dish was very tasty, it was very mild on the peanut flavor. I plan to rework this sauce in a number of ways, specifically I plan to try increasing the ground peanuts from 2 teaspoons to 2 tablespoons to help the peanut flavor develop.

My favorite thing about this recipe was that it required so little oil. Most eggplant recipes involve frying them in oil, which they absorb readily. Here, they were cooked in the spiced tomato sauce with only 1-2 TBS of oil. The eggplant and potato were tender and beautifully spiced, I just wish the peanut flavor hadn't been lost in the tomatoes and spices. Still, a very tasty eggplant dish: