Grilled Eggplant Salad
A juicy room-temperature salad built around the smoky soft flesh of whole-roasted eggplant. The eggplant flavour anchors everything, mildly bitter, deeply smoky if you can blister the skin first, almost meaty in texture once scooped. Around it, finely chopped tomato and cucumber release their water and form a brothy dressing on the bottom of the bowl, sweetened slightly by the addition of a pinch of sugar and sharpened by black rice vinegar (Chinkiang, the malty, dark, slightly sweet variety, not the white-rice kind). Browned garlic in olive oil folds in last and carries the aroma. Easy to make and forgiving; the only step that requires care is roasting the eggplants long enough that the flesh is properly soft. Sits alongside polo or naan as a fresh, juicy counter to the heavier mains of the Uyghur table, and the kind of dish made every day in summer when eggplants are cheap and good in the Kashgar bazaars.