*ahem* Moving on....
A friend of mine actually suggested that I make this dish for my "E" week (after he insulted my choice for "D" week lol), and I took his opinion into account. I've never made this before, and I see it all the time on menus at Italian places, so why the hell not? I love me some good eggplant (I love it so much, I forgot to take a picture of the entirely finished product... note: missing corner) :)
This dish is, in case you couldn't guess, Italian. I've officially used one of my "easy recipes" countries (its a lot easier to find an Italian recipe than a lot of other genres of food)... I think I'm running out of easy countries lol. I've done America and Italy... maybe China will be next? Who knows :P I've never had eggplant parmesan before, so I'm pretty excited!
Anyway, lets get to the point!
Here's the link to the recipe, courtesy of allrecipes once again: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Eggplant-Parmesan-II/Detail.aspx
And the dealio with this recipe:
Rating: 4.5/5
Cost: less than ~$20!!
Difficulty: Pretty simple dewds
Eat it again?: FO' SHO.
Allergies: nuffing cept Gluten and lots of cheese
I made a couple changes to this recipe, one which was using two eggplants instead of three like the recipe suggests. I'd go with 2. In fact, 2 was exactly enough to finish about 3 layers of eggplant in this lovely dish :D Any more and I don't think my pan would have been able to hold it all lol. The other change was I baked the eggplants longer than 5 minutes on each side. I think I baked them at about 10 minutes on each side (like a couple of people suggested), and I think it really helped to make it awesome :) Crispy eggplant with great flavor? Yes please!
So there was quite a bit of eggplant to work with. I wish I had two baking sheets to bake the eggplant on, but I didn't, so I had to use some kind of random things I found in the kitchen drawer to actually bake all the eggplant in a sufficient amount of time. The dipping in egg and then into the breadcrumbs was easy, sticking them in the oven was easy, pretty much everything was easy! Some people on allrecipes.com suggest that I sweat the eggplant (when I first heard the term of "sweating an eggplant," I imagined an eggplant in gym gear sweating and running. Dont' tell me you didn't imagine the same thing). Sweating an eggplant is a process in which you pour salt on the eggplant, wait for 30 minutes, then wash it off. It's supposed to get rid of the natural bitterness of the eggplant (or at least soften the bitterness), but I didn't have enough time to do that, so I just went straight to cutting.
It was just a layering process, a lot like lasagna. Sauce, eggplant, cheese, sauce, eggplant, cheese, etc etc. The last layer, though, I put down the eggplant first, then put the sauce and cheese on top to make it look all pretty :) YEY FOR PRETTY FOOD~ It looks so beautiful, mmmm looking at it is making me hungry for it again xD
This dish was really good! I think next time I'll use a more savory pasta sauce, though (Ragu's sundried tomato and basil was a little bit sweet). I really liked the eggplant and I felt good because it was a baked version of eggplant parmesan (apparently it's usually fried...?) There was a shitton of cheese which I probably could have done without... I really don't think I needed so much lol. I ended up picking a lot of out of my food- partly because I'm lactose-intolerant, and also because I don't want to gain fifty pounds from fatty cheese in one meal XD ITS SO HARD TO LOSE WEIGHT WHEN SOMETHING SO DELICIOUS IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF MEEEE.
I would for sure recommend this dish to any college kid, basically because it makes enough for about 4-5 people (depending on how hungry you are), its pretty cheap to make, and its really easy! All it takes is a little bit of time. I don't think this recipe is as college-friendly as the Dijon Grilled Pork Chops (I'm not sure when I'm going to use Italian bread crumbs again), but overall, pretty amazing!!
This recipe was so good, my boyfriend finally got the guts to ask if he could take the food I make home with him. He said he had been meaning to ask me for a while now, but he felt bad asking me since I made the food with my blood, sweat, and tears. But something about this recipe put him over the edge :D I guess I'll have less eggplant parmesan for myself, but he said he'd take me out to eat a couple extra times! AWESOME TRADES ARE AWESOME!!
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