Wanga bhaji recipe

I found a few recipes floating around on scraps of paper in my laptop case. I’m sorry if you don’t care about the recipes. My dish today is wanga bhaji. Wanga means eggplant in Marathi.

Fun Fact

Tween-Thriftygal once tried to play “wanga” for the question of which pizza topping starts with the letter W. It was in a board game called Scattergories. We ruled it a disqualification because it was in a different language and not because you can’t put eggplant on pizza. What can you put on pizza that starts with a “W” though?

It’s weird, the things we remember.

Ingredients

• 10 baby eggplants. Indian eggplants, I think they’re called.
• 2 small onions
• 1 medium-sized tomato
• A few bunches of cilantro
• 2-3 cloves of garlic

Spices

• 1/2 tsp each
  • mustard seeds
  • cumin seeds

Powder spices

• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp each
  • cayenne pepper
  • garam masala
  • coriander powder
  • salt
• 3 tspns of roasted peanut powder. The same stuff from steps five and six of this recipe.

Directions

1. Cut the eggplant by cutting off the stem, turning it over and cutting an “X” through it. Stop before you make it all the way through the eggplant. Here, let me show you a picture.

2. Mix all the powder spices together in a dish.

3. Take the spices from the second step and stuff it into the eggplant from the first step.

4. Dice the onions, garlic and tomatoes.

5. Heat some oil in a medium pot on the stove.

6. Put in the mustard seeds.

7. When the mustard seeds make some noise, a “pop” sound, add in the cumin seeds.

8. Add in the diced onions and garlic.

9. Let cook until the onions are translucent.

10. Add in the tomatoes.

11. Add the stuffed eggplant you made in step 3 to the pot.

12. Let cook and add water periodically. I added about 1.5 cups of water. It depends on how much gravy you want. I love gravy.

13. If you have any leftover spices from step 2, you can add that here.

14. Let cook on low heat. Maybe 20 minutes.

15. Throw in some cilantro.

16. Enjoy with, you guessed it, thecha and yogurt and basmati rice.

Acceptable Deviations

1. You can use green tomatoes if you don’t have eggplants. Medium-sized green tomatoes.
2. You can omit the red tomatoes if you don’t like gravy.