Our group of volunteers has started to join cooking workshops at Internationaler Bund Polska’s Multicultural Centre. Aytakin was the first, so she could show a recipe from Azerbaijan. She prepared Badimcan sırdagı. It’s a vegetarian meal with fried eggplants, tomatoes and green bell peppers . We got the recipe, so you can cook this meal!

Badimcan sırdagı consists of the following ingredients (the size is designed for 4 people):

3 eggplants, 3 green peppers, 3 tomatoes, 2 garlic, oil, seed or corn oil, salt and black pepper powder.

Method of preparation:

Step 1. First, we peel the eggplants and chop them so that they are not too thick. We salt the eggplant slices and keep them for 10 minutes so that their bitterness goes away.

Step 2. Divide the green peppers and tomatoes into 4 parts.

Step 3. Crush the garlic and chop it into small pieces.

Step 4. Pour oil into a well-heated pan and wait for it to be hot.

Step 5. Fry both sides of the salted eggplants in oil and after frying, put them in a separate bowl.

Step 6. Fry the green peppers in the same oil and put them in a separate bowl.

Step 7. After frying the tomatoes in the same way, we turn off the bottom of the pan and put a part of the tomatoes in a separate bowl, and keep the rest in the pan.

Step 8. On top of the remaining tomatoes in the pan, which will cover the area of ​​the pan, we place one part of fried eggplants, one part of garlic, and one part of fried green pepper on top of each other in the form of 2 sheets.

Step 9. We close the lid of the pan and put it for 15 minutes on low heat.

The dish can be served with yogurt or mayonnaise and is usually eaten with bread.

The last phase of the recipe, when the vegetables are kept on low heat,  lasts fifteen minutes, and, as Aytakin told us, “an Azerbajiani knows with his or her heart when the meal is cooked”. Let’s see what we can do!