Eggplant: easier than you think.

The eggplant: It sits there in the vegetable aisle, dark, foreboding, impenetrable. What are you supposed to do with that thing? Somehow Italian restaurants transform it into the uber-delicious eggplant parm hero, but the novice chef throws up his hands and reaches for the good old broccoli instead.
Fear not, novice chef, I'm here to help, with a recipe for baked eggplant that is as easy as slice, bake, top, and eat.
Alot of eggplant recipes start out with the following directions: "Slice eggplant, put slices in a colander, sprinkle with salt, let sit for 2 hours, rinse, and pat dry".
WTF? Who has time for that? I must have ADD, but any recipe that involves leaving something alone for more than 30 minutes is too long. Knowing me, I would do the first step and then completely forget about the eggplant and find it two days later, resplendent with mold. So I have always skipped this salting step, which is supposed to prevent the eggplant from having a bitter taste, and have never found my cooked eggplant bitter at all. I now feel vindicated in skipping this step and confident in passing on this tip to all of you in blog-land because I just found the following on Wikipedia:
Salting and then rinsing the sliced eggplant (known as "degorging") can soften and remove much of the bitterness though this is often unnecessary. Some modern varieties do not need this treatment, as they are far less bitter.
Ha! I knew it! If you see any recipes for eggplant involving this step, go ahead and skip it. Veggielicious and Wikipedia say so.
Anyway, on to the recipe. Actually, not yet. I could teach you how to make pizzeria-style eggplant parmesan, which involves breading and frying the eggplant. I used to make that all the time, but stopped for a few reasons:
-it's messy and time-consuming to do the breading;
-watching the eggplant soak up massive quantities of oil as I fried it freaked me out, as I am diet-conscious and don't want to eat 4 tablespoons of oil for lunch;
-baking the eggplant turns out a dish that is just as flavorful, but lighter and much easier.
So, the recipe:
-Take your eggplant and slice it into rounds about a 1/2 inch in thickness. I've found that cutting them thinner gets better results. If you have a thing against the skin you can peel it off, but I like it and we all know that vegetable skins are good for you, especially dark-hued ones.
-Salt the slices and leave them in a colander for 2 hours. Just kidding! Eggplant joke!
-Prepare your baking sheets (aka cooking sheet): If you have a pastry brush, use this to brush some olive oil on the sheet to prevent the eggplant from sticking.
If not, pour on some olive oil and spread it around with a paper towel. You could probably also spray it with cooking spray.
-Next, lay the eggplant slices out on the baking sheet. Brush the tops lightly with oil if you have a pastry brush- if not, use a paper towel, and make a note to buy yourself a pastry brush. Put some black pepper on top.
-If you have a red bell pepper in your fridge, wash it, cut it in half, and put it skin-side up on the cookie sheet along with the eggplant. If not, don't worry about it.
-Cook the eggplant for about 25 minutes. When it's done it will look like this:



-Get out a baking dish, around a 9x9 brownie-pan like dish is fine. Put some pasta sauce on the bottom of the dish, then a layer of eggplant, then some Parmesan cheese. If you cooked the red pepper, remove what you can of the skin, slice into thin strips, and put it in with the eggplant. You can also put in thin slices of onion, and some sliced garlic if you're not making this dish for a first date.

-When you are done layering the eggplant, sauce, and Parm, you can top it with mozzarella cheese. I didn't do this last time because I didn't have any, and didn't miss it.

-Bake this in the oven at 400 for 20 minutes. In the meantime, boil some spaghetti.
Serve the spaghetti topped with eggplant and an extra sprinkle of Parm. Tell your friends it is 'Spaghetti melanzana', which means 'spaghetti with eggplant' but sounds fancier.
Variations: I bet this would be great served in a toasted hoagie/sub/grinder roll, but I've never tried it. If you're a low-carber, you could eat this straight up, with no pasta or bread. I had it last night with nothing, but it was more satisfying with the spaghetti.
Bon appetit!

Indian-esque

I love Indian food, and that's only because I forced myself to try it again after initially not liking it. I can't exactly remember the first time I had Indian- it must have been in high school or early college- but I know that I had something I didn't like, and my brain created a link that was basically "Indian food=disgusting".

Then my senior year in college, I became friends with an Indian guy in one of my sociology classes and he invited me to go out for Indian food with him. Not wanting to insult him or, oh, a billion of his compatriots, I decided to try it again. The fact that it was a buffet encouraged me, because that way I could a) see and smell the food before putting it on my plate and b) discreetly shovel food in my napkin if I didn't like it and go back to the buffet for something different, like plain white rice.

Lo and behold, I loved everything at the buffet. (everything vegetarian, of course). Since that fateful trip to the Indian buffet in Boston, I have loved Indian food.
***note: I know that at this point, Indian foodies/experts/actual Indian people are rolling their eyes and thinking that "Indian food" is too wide a term, that I don't have any idea about the regional differences that exist in Indian cuisine, and that if all I have ever eaten is faux Indian food, then I am woefully ignorant. I agree with all of the above. I would love to learn more about Indian cuisine, and am open to anyone sponsoring a trip to India for me to master the art of Indian cooking and report back on my blog.

After Boston I moved to Paris, where there was no shortage of authentic Indian restaurants. There was one walking distance from my apartment, with reasonable prices and a nice vegetarian selection:
http://www.eat-out.net/restaurant-paris/wy35208-new-sanna
But since moving to Fernandina Beach, Florida, I have been deprived of nearby Indian restaurants. There are definitely some in Jacksonville, but somehow in 5 years of living here I have not made it to one. So the closest I have come to eating Indian has been Amy's frozen Indian meals, which are good, but expensive:


I have a couple of Indian cookbooks, but the recipes usually involve no fewer than 20 spices, a mortar and pestle, and clarifying butter. Being a single mom with what feels like 10 different jobs, I have no time for such preparations. So I started experimenting with the variety of jarred Indian sauces you can buy at nice supermarkets or health food stores. Basically you prepare whatever vegetables and proteins appeal to you, mix the sauce in, make some rice, and voila, a quasi-Indian-esque stand-in for real Indian food. The vegetables I used this time around were:
onion, garlic, carrots, spinach, potatoes, and chick peas.
I chopped the onion and garlic and put that in the frying pan with some oil to get started, and then added the carrots. I used fresh spinach for this one, but you could use frozen. Cooking fresh spinach is really easy; in this case, I already had the onion, garlic, and carrots in the pan, and then I added a small amount of water (less than 1/4 cup), heaped the fresh spinach on top, and perched the lid on top of that. After a couple of minutes the spinach starts cooking down and you can move it around so more raw spinach goes to the bottom of the pan. After another minute or so the spinach is cooked. At that point I added the sauce- in this case, Karala Curry Vegetable Kurma Sauce-and let it all simmer together for a minute. I had made basmati rice on the side (boil in bag- no measuring- no burning!) and put the whole thing together.

Now, I love Indian, but I don't love spicy. Call me a wimp, but I don't like having my mouth on fire and my nose running at the dinner table. This sauce was too spicy for me, so to thin the flavor out I added a can of chick peas and a can of diced potatoes. That made it much less spicy while still being flavorful.
So the next time you want a satisfying curry but are short on time and/or the only spice in your pantry is oregano that expired in 1988, try making an Indian-inspired meal at home with store-bought sauce. You won't feel as if you've been transported to India, but you might feel as if you were at the Epcot Center version of it.