"Aubergine with black garlic" and "Tomato roasted lemon salad" from "Plenty more"

We had our friend over for dinner and I had a chance to try two recipes from the new book of Yotam Ottolenghi "Plenty more".

I tried "Aubergine with black garlic" and "Tomato roasted lemon salad" from "Plenty more". Both were delicious dishes to share as starter/meze with our traditional drink "Raki".

I roasted the aubergines in the oven as the recipe and they turned out the be the best roasted aubergines I have done so far. Lovely golden brown, soft and delicious. I guess I will be roasting the aubergines this way for other dishes as well.

I put 3 aubergines, sliced about 1.5 cm thick round slices in a bowl and poured over 50ml of olive oil with seasoning and mixed everything well until aubergines are coated in oil. Roasted in the highest oven setting for 30 minutes. Recipe calls for sage however there wasn't any sage in Waitrose so I had to leave it out.

This is how the aubergines looked as they came out of the oven.

I didn't take a photo but we had oven baked wild sea bass as our main. As our oven is tricky and I managed to get the fish well cooked not over done or underdone I thought I should note down here how I have done it.

I scored the fish, and rubbed with olive oil and salt and pepper. Filled the gavity with 1 whole lemon sliced 2-3 mm thick rounds, and tarragon. Covered the fish with baking paper, didn't have any foil left. Baked in pre-heated gas 5 oven for almost an hour. It was a big fish, weighed about 1.2kg after the head was taken -off.

As a part of our sugar-free-september we didn't have desert, just strawberies and later on Turkish coffee at the end to make us sober.