Pilaf wrap with Eggplant

It's been for a while I didn't post something new on my blog.... The reason friends, that's because I started to join Turkish language class here in my city. Actually I'm pretty late to join that class which special for foreigner.. the class will be over on this summer vocation, but it's okay, after summer holiday I can continue from the basic again. Class takes weekdays for few hours, so I'm a little bit busy and maybe a little bit late writing and sharing on my blog to you all my friends... But however, I'll try to keep writing and cooking and sharing... those are my great passion after all....

Another great thing I like is rice/ pilaf... in any ways, I just love it..  ..Cause maybe mostly we eat rice as primer food in my homeland. We eat everything with rice. And we have many variety of food make from rice/ pilaf. Maybe you already know about Indonesian Fried rice.. or you heard about "nasi Tumpeng" or "nasi Kuning" .. all of them made from rice.. so here another my favorite of pilaf.. wrap with eggplant.. it's great ! and it will soon become your family's fave too @(^,^)@

Servings 6 ~ 8
Ingredients:
- 2 kg eggplant. Peel and damping in salt water for a while.
- 250 gr lamb/ beef meat. Cut into small chunks.
- 2 cups long grain rice. Rinse and drain.
- 1 large onion. Chop finely.
- 2 cloves garlic. Crushed and finely chopped.
- 2 tablespoons pine nuts.
- ± 25 stalks celery,  just take leaves part. Chop roughly.
- 2 tsp all spice
- Homemade chili and tomato paste @¼ tbsp .
- 1 tsp pepper powder or to taste.
- Salt to taste.
- 3 ½ cups beef broth / hot water.
- Enough cooking oil.

Method:
1) Slice the eggplant lengthwise ± ½ cm-thick (one eggplant can be about 5 ~ 6 eggplant slices depending on diameter). Fry with small amount hot oil in several batches until cooked. Absorb the remaining oil with paper towel. Set aside.
2) Heat enough oil in the pan/ skillet with a lid. Cook meat until done, stir in onion and garlic, saute until transparent. Mix in the pine nuts, continue to saute several minutes. Combine the rice and stir well.
3) Mix in tomato paste and chili paste and stir well. Pour the beef broth/ hot water. Add  all spice powder, salt and pepper. Mix well and test the taste. Cover the pan/ skillet, turn the heat to lowest flame. Cook for few minutes (± 20 minutes) until rice absorbed all the broth/ liquid. Remove from fire. Combine celery and stir well.
4) Prepare a baking sheet size 8 "(± 18 cm Ø) - I use a bundt pan. Arrange eggplant in pan base to cover the entire pan base. Put pilaf mixture and cover it with remaining eggplant. Bake in the preheat oven to 160 ⁰C for 30 minutes.


Serve warm.

Enjoy.