Messy Mezze

One of my favourite ways to eat is to pick at food.  Cheese and biscuits, tapas, antipasti and mezze all please me immensely. I can eat as much, or as little, as I want and if I don't like something it doesn't even land on my plate. It can be as complicated, or as simple as you like; there could just be 2 or 3 items to pick from or many more.

Cooking for friends last night, I decided to serve up a mezze type affair as a starter. We had the char-grilled aubergine slices and the roasted peppers previously used here along with the oven-dried tomatoes from here.  I served them all up on plate with some olives thrown in along with some houmus and slices of pitta breads to dip.

This time I added some roughly chopped up garlic and some sprigs of thyme when roasting the peppers.  Those who have been reading this will know that I'd made the tomatoes a few days earlier and they had been sat in their own juices and gallons of olive oil in the fridge since then. I'd also stuck some chunks of garlic and chopped up thyme in for extra flavour. 

I think the tomatoes were the highlight-as good as any other I have tried. Given that I had used some pretty cheap, bland tasting tomatoes I was surprised how strong their flavour was after drying them. They were worth the 28 hours prep! The peppers were nice and sweet, even the green ones (which I don't normally bother with) were really tasty and the aubergines were slightly smoky from the char-grill and great for mopping up the juices from the peppers and tomatoes.

I was really pleased with how everything turned out and it will be our Christmas Day starter.