Preheat oven to 200C.

Toast your caraway seeds, if you have a spice grinder or mortar and pestle grind up the caraway seeds, then add them to a small mixing bowl along with the rest of the dry spices, stir them together. You can get away with not toasting or grinding the caraway seeds, but it really brings on a lovely depth of flavour.

Cut eggplant in 1/2 lengthways and score. Arrange them on a large stainless steel baking tray and drizzle over 2 Tbsp of olive oil, then sprinkle over half the spice mix. Bake for 35-40 mins or until centre is soft.

While the eggplants are cooking prepare your onion, garlic and tomatoes.

Add the remaining Tbsp of olive oil to a frypan and gently sauté the onion and garlic until translucent. Add leftover spice mix and stir until fragrant. Add your diced tomatoes and cook until reduced down.

Stir through your chickpeas and fresh herbs, turn off heat and set aside until your eggplants are ready.

Once the eggplants are soft in the centre, you can scoop out the flesh of the eggplant and add it to your tomato mixture. Stir it through and then fill up the hollow eggplants with the mix. Alternately, you could actually leave the flesh in the eggplant and simply spoon the tomato mixture over the top, it doesn’t really make much difference, but each person has their own preference of how they’d like to do it.

Return to the oven to bake for a further 15 mins.

Serve while hot, alongside a greek salad and some cous cous, rice, polenta, mash potato, cauliflower rice or on its own.

OPTIONAL DRESSING.

If making the optional dressing, place all the ingredients into a small bowl and whisk to incorporate, adding some water until your desired thickness is achieved. The sauce will actually thicken quite a bit while resting so I always like to make it just a little runnier than I would like.

Make the dressing while waiting for the eggplants to finish cooking, stir in the fridge until ready to use. Dressing will keep well in the fridge for 5-7 days.