Fire your oven until it reaches 700ºF, and then allow the temperature to fall to about 500ºF. You want a hot enough oven to brown your ingredients before adding the liquid ingredients, so keep a bed of coals.

Combine the eggplant and onions and olive oil in a terracotta roasting dish and add them to your oven. Brown the eggplant and glaze the onions.

Alternatively, you can roast the onions in a second terracotta pan, similar to the red onion recipe on page 74.

When the eggplant has browned on one side, you can turn them over. If they are browning too fast, and are not yet tender, you can either cover the pan with foil or a lid, or add stock to the vegetables.

After turning, the skin side is up and they baked a while longer. They almost look overdone and are starting to wrinkle a bit.

Remove the pan from oven and leave the eggplant and onion to cool. Then, remove the inner roasted eggplant from the skin and crust, serve and eat! The eggplant scoops should be more than a mouthful but easily transferred to your plate to cut and eat.

This dish can be served warm to cool, and you might have some bread to soak up the drippings.