I've noticed that some people find cooking eggplants a little tricky. The mistake people often make is not to cook them long enough and they taste bitter and unpleasant. I used to cook them mainly in olive oil. But recently I've begun cooking an exclusively indian diet. I have some lovely recipes of eggplant in yoghurt curry (you should be able to find recipes on the web if interested and eat them served with basmati rice and other indian dishes). The point I wanted to make was that in my recipes, I've discovered that one can cook eggplants very well under the griller without oil as the first part of cooking. I believe this approach would transfer to any european style of cooking them as well. Simply cut the eggplant in half lengthwise, place it under the grill element with the skin side up. Cook until the soft and the skin starts to blister. Its about 15 minutes but check. After this you can finish off the cooking by frying it in oil with the rest of your ingredients and it shouldn't require as much oil as if you were cooking it from scratch in the frypan.

- Andrea