İmam bayıldı

A typical imam bayıldı.

Our second date was dinner at Shari's apartment in Langley. She made imam bayıldı, a popular Ottoman dish of sliced eggplants stuffed with onion, garlic and tomatoes, then simmered in olive oil.

İmam bayıldı means "the imam fainted." The name derives from a story that an imam's wife prepared the dish which was so delicious that the imam swooned. Alternatively, the imam swooned because of the amount of olive oil used in the recipe. Suffice it to say that I swooned over the dish that Shari made for me on that second date.

Shari made imam bayıldı yesterday. The occasion was a periodic shopping visit at Caravan, our very, very favorite Middle Eastern grocery store, where she bought some of the small purple eggplants used to make the dish. We get things at Caravan we can't get anywhere else: shelves crowded with exotic and fragrant foods, spices, and utensils used in Middle Eastern cooking, whether North African (the owner, Mr. Soliman, is from Libya), the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, Turkey, Iran, and more. Caravan is where we buy our Krinos olive oil from Crete in 3-liter cans, our Iranian saffron, Armenian nazook pastry, different varieties of bulk imported olives, the occasional jar of caviar, Bulgarian jams, fresh made sheets of round Kurdish bread, etc. It's a pleasure shopping there, literally rubbing shoulders in the narrow aisles with all sorts of people from other parts of the world. Like Mr. Soliman himself, his staff is invariably hospitable, which is what to expect from a shop that closes each Friday afternoon for prayers.

The small purple eggplants inspired Shari to exercise her culinary magic. Her specialty includes Turkish and other eastern Mediterranean cooking. Eggplants were split, their flesh criss-crossed with a knife, then salted until the liquid could be squeezed out. Lots of fresh basil, dill and Italian parsley from Shari's garden were combined with stewed tomatoes, garlic, onions, kırmızı biber, olive oil and, something of which Shari was particularly pleased with, a tiny hint of cinnamon. The stuffed aubergines were baked slowly for ninety minutes, decorating the house with an appetizingly exotic fragrance.

Her imam bayıldı was nothing short of perfection: tender, flavorful, melt-in-your-mouth, swoon-worthy magnificent, more than enough to inspire me to write a very grateful blog entry.