Another roasted egg plant dip

I'm heading out of town for most of the month of July. One of my most difficult culinary tasks every time I leave the city for an extended period of time is to use up all of the perishable items which I happen to have accumulated in the fridge. I think of it as some version of balancing a checkbook, or perhaps like the game Rummikub (where I would often try to use all of my pieces in some sort of miraculous combination of moves --- often failing).

In any case, as my travel date approached I realized that I had an excess of yogurt -- much more than was necessary to finish of my latest batch of granola. Along with the yogurt, my fridge has recently been haunted with an eggplant in desperate need of cooking. The necessity to use these two items precipitated the following eggplant dip recipe (plus I had a lot of garlic which needed using too!).

As with my last eggplant escapade, I decided to roast it over the open flame. This time I covered the surface more completely with foil to help with cleanup. The roasting took about 10 minutes afterwhich I left it in a bowl for another 10 minutes, then sliced it in half and let it drain through a colander for a little while. During this draining I took three heads of garlic and, with boredom mounting, peeled every single clove (probably 50 or so in all). These went into a cast iron pan with ample olive oil and roasted until nice, brown and soft. By the point that these were done my eggplant was drained and I had transferred it to a large bowl and mashed it up. The garlic also got a good mashing. Enter the yogurt! I spooned maybe 5 large spoonfuls of yogurt into the mixture and then mashed it all together some more. To this I finally added some more oil, and a fair amount of salt, pepper, ground cumin, smoked paprika, chili powder, and a little tumeric. The taste was nice --- the eggplant and yogurt flavors started strong and then the spices gave an after flavor. However it lacked something in the middle, so I add to it a little balsamic vinegar and some honey and mustard. Now it was good.

So, last night I had this with some large pretzels. Right now I am envisioning myself eating it with some crispy cast iron toasted tortilla as well. Well... to tell the truth I'm mostly thinking about eating watermelon when I get home -- but this dip is good too.