Roasted Eggplant and Olive Salad
A fun way to enjoy eggplant, this dish combines the salty flavor of olives with the sweetness of sundried tomatoes to form a wonderful combination perfect next to any entree!
Opposites really do attract! This salad is the most quintessential salad I may have ever tasted. In the most basic definition, a salad should be a mixture of flavors and textures of various kinds. When creating a new dish, I like to pull from opposite flavors to bring about new tastes, but the extent to which that happened here was an accidental happenstance that worked out in a way I couldn’t have planned any better! Sundried tomatoes by nature have an almost sweet profile to them, which is a perfect complement to the saltiness of the olives. While the eggplant is roasted and provides some flavor, texturally, it is still a fairly soft contribution to this salad, which is made up for with the crunch from the almonds. All around a great mix of ingredients for a fun salad!
The orchestrator. Eggplant is a nice vegetable to work with because it is fairly bland by itself and picks up the seasoning added to it. Because of this, it’s both a blessing and a curse when using seasoning or oil, as you must be careful or you will have greasy bites of strong spices. While creating this recipe, I wanted to keep things fairly neutral as the added ingredients brought so much of their own flavor. Once I had the eggplant roasted, I tried a few bites with curry and a few with cumin, both of which brought great flavor and completely changed the feel of this salad. It would be interesting to experiment with how you season the eggplant, depending on the entree you are serving this with. The possibilities are endless!
This recipe was created as a part of the Tour of the Markets challenge, where I try to create new and creative dishes with seasonal produce. If you haven’t been following along, catch up on the tours and recipes here!
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Roasted Eggplant and Olive Salad
Equipment
- Baking sheet
- Mixing bowl
- Kitchen knife
Ingredients
- 1 medium Eggplant
- 8-10 assorted Olives I used kalamata and green
- 2 tbsp Slivered Almonds
- 1/4 cup Sundried Tomatoes
- 2 tbsp Olive Oil
- 1 tsp Garlic Powder
- 1 tsp Onion Powder
- Salt and Pepper to taste
Instructions
- Heat oven to 350. In a mixing bowl, combine cubed eggplant, about a tbsp of olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder, and toss well.
- Spread on a baking sheet and put in the oven for about 30 minutes, tossing as it cooks.
- While the eggplant is roasting, in a mixing bowl, combine olives sliced in half, sundried tomatoes, the remaining olive oil, and slivered almonds. Mix together well.
- When eggplant is roasted, take out and allow to cool. Add to the mixing bowl of ingredients, tossing well to coat. Add additional olive oil if needed. Serve and enjoy! Variation: for a change in flavor, use cumin or curry when roasting the eggplant.
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