Millet salad with miso eggplant

This millet salad with miso eggplant is super easy to prepare, grounding, and nutrient-dense, combining millet with delicious umami miso-infused eggplant, creating a rewarding dish. We layered the ensemble here with our classic tahini dressing for additional earthy garlic flavours. The joy of this recipe is how chic it sounds and looks and still how simple it is, with only three primary ingredients and a marinade. I also love that you could create a sophisticated and nutritive food experience for potential guests in no time.

For additional food historical context, learn that eggplants originate from China and India. They were later introduced in southern and eastern Europe by the Spanish Moors in the Middle Ages and again to the Americas during the 1500s colonisations.

3 reasons to love eggplants, and this millet salad with miso marinade too.

When I was younger, I didn't appreciate eggplants, also known as aubergine. My mom would prepare them in all sorts of ways—in a traditional Ratatouille, in a stew or stuffed and baked in the oven. I wasn't fond of the texture of this vegetable, and the taste was bitter to me, no matter the sauce. Thankfully, my palate has changed, and I do enjoy my mom's versions now, as well as other ways to prepare eggplants, such as this millet salad and miso eggplant. There are so many reasons to like eggplant. Here are three of them.

Versatile. Veggies are generally versatile, but eggplants are particularly adaptable. They can be baked, blended, charred, roasted, sauteed, steamed, stewed. Aubergines taste is neutral, and they absorb flavours well, pairing nicely with all sorts of marinade, seasoning, sauce, and coating. Finally, it is soft, so uncomplicated to slice and make look fancy.

Nutritive. Eggplants are considered a superfood. They are loaded with fibre, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals and are very low in calories, meaning consuming eggplant would help reduce the risk of heart disease and control blood sugar levels. Medical News Today tells me that one serving of eggplant (approximately 100g) can provide up to 5% of your daily intake of fibre, copper, manganese, Vitamins B1, and B6.

Easy to grow. If done in the correct conditions, growing eggplant is not rocket science—simply sowing the seeds in well-drained healthy soil, either in pots or in the ground, keeping the plants warm at a minimum of 18°C and protected from pests. Approximately 70 days later, you should be able to harvest four to six shiny and purple fruits. You can pick the young and small eggplants or wait a bit and get bigger ones. Along the way, the growing plants will also embellish your environment with purple and white flowers before bearing their fruits.

So this is it, the last recipe from our free ebook, the last standing. Now, all the recipes are reshot and published on the website, accessible for all—five years after the first iteration and the beginning of this venture. It's interesting to look at the progress and experience made over all those years and how much we both learned, grew and changed. It feels nostalgic but also high-spirited to remember the joy this publication brought to my life.