Yesterday (along with a bunch of punk rakas from Poke), I took part in my first ever cooking class, given by Ottolenghi at the Leiths School of Food and Wine. A deal was forged – something along the lines of: website we make, cook you teach. So now, Ottolenghi has a shiny new digital home, and we have bulging bellies.

Yotam O. was kind enough to conjure up a vegetarian main for the two veggies of the bunch to prepare. Following the Ottolenghi spirit, it’s a simple yet divine dish of baked aubergine wedges with yoghurt sauce and pomegranate. Now, aubergine and yoghurt – fine, we’ve done that before. But, the addition of pomegranate is visionary.

• 2 medium aubergines, cut into wedges. Cut them in half horizontally, and then slice up the wedges out of the two halves.
• A mixture of nice, fruity extra-virgin olive oil and some lighter olive oil. About 3 parts of the nice stuff to 1 part of the cheap stuff.
• Some yoghurt sauce. Figure it out. (Yoghurt, garlic, oil, lemon, herbs…you can’t go wrong.)
• 1 pomegranate, seeded
• Salt + pepper, of course.

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C.
2. Arrange the aubergine wedges on a baking sheet and brush them very liberally with olive oil. Sprinkle on a hearty dose of salt and pepper.
3. Pop those puppies in the oven. It’ll take a while. So make yourself some yogurt sauce and set it aside. While your at it, get those pesky pomegranate seeds out.
4. Check your aubergine after 20 minutes or so, but it’ll probably take 30-40 minutes depending on the chunkiness of your wedges. They should be a healthy, dark brown. Give those beauties a little squeeze with your fingers to see if they’re properly done. They should feel pretty mushy.
5. Plate em up with some of the yoghurt sauce and pomegranate seeds. So very, very good.

We also prepared a cucumber + onion salad, bulghur wheat with caramelized onion and feta, and some crazy raspberry and passion fruit mess. All delicious.