To prepare the eggplants for this dish, you first of all need to soak your eggplants for about fifteen minutes in a bowl of water. While this is soaking, you can start preparing the filling. Mix the spices except for the cumin. If you could not get fennel powder, you need to grind the seeds first. Add some water to the spices to turn them into a paste and add salt according to your taste.

Heat up one tablespoon of olive oil in a wok. Add the paste of spices as soon as it is hot. For about five minutes you stir the paste and fry it until it becomes golden and does not stick to the sides of the wok anymore. Then you can switch off the stove, take out the paste and let it cool down.

In the meantime you will make the eggplants ready for getting filled. Take them out of the water and, with a sharp knife, cut deeply into one side of the vegetable so that you can open it. When you have cut your eggplants, the spices will be cold and you can fill the paste into the gaps in the eggplants.

Next, you need to heat up another three tablespoons of oil in your wok. Put one teaspoon of cumin seeds into the oil and right away add the eggplants. Now you fry the eggplants in the oil with cumin. Turn them to fry them from every side. Obviously bigger eggplants will need longer time to get done while small ones are more quickly soft. As I told you before, just press them on the top side and see whether they are soft there. If they are, your eggplants are soft inside, too, and you can take them out of the wok.

Now you only need to make your tomato sauce. For this you heat up some water in a pot and then shortly boil the tomatoes in it. Take them out after about two minutes and peel them. Put them into a blender and make puree out of them.

Heat up the remaining tablespoon of oil in a wok and add cumin. When the cumin is changing its colour, add the tomato puree into the wok and heat it up while stirring from time to time. When this sauce is hot, add the eggplants into it. Stir them in the sauce a bit so that they get covered with tomato sauce and get hot again. In the end you can add salt into the sauce according to your taste.