Fatty Thursday- 7.29.11

    yesyes, i know it's a friday. but eyyyy, i had this all written out before i was too tired to finish yesterday night. but enough of that, guess what i decided to tackle this week? yup, that's right, eggplant parmesan. very exciting i know. i got the recipe here. if you have never checked out seriouseats.com, you should probably get around to that. they have some really sweet schtuff...recipes, reviews and all things food-related. 

   
     there's not really a lot of ingredients to eggplant parm as one might think. eggplant, tomatoes, cheese, and herbs (parsley, basil and oregano). throw in some garlic and oil and you're good to go. the recipe was prettttyy easy to follow... the first fail part was me getting the wrong eggplant. yup, silly me failed to read the recipe right and bought big o'l fat royal eggplant instead of the skinny italian eggplant. goo me! luckily, it didn't cause much of a problem, besides for the size. (more on that later). 
     the recipe calls for something called purging. and contrary to what you might think, it has nothing to do with eating disorders. you see, eggplants suck up liquid like crazy. to deal with that, you get some kosher salt, sprinkle lightly over the sliced eggplant, toss em in a colander and wait it out bout 30 minutes to an hour. longer, if you want. i was rather skeptical about it but i followed along and sprinkled, actually more like poured, salt onto the eggplant. what do you know...thirty minutes later, lo and behold, the blackish eggplant juice was dripping out the bottom of the drainer faster than anything i'd ever seen. gross. i would recommend purging the eggplant and leaving it to drain at least for more than an hour. i left it for 45 minutes and water was still coming out of it just before i was about to fry it.

KOSHERR.

     anyway, going on...my second fail of the day was chopping up the onion and assuming that it was supposed to be part of the recipe. what i WAS supposed to do was cut it in half, let it cook with the tomatoes and garlic then dump it away. now that i think about it, i don't think i was going to throw away a whole, cooked onion. and besides eggplant parm with onion still tasted the same to me. hehe.

     fast forward, everything else was pretty smooth from then on...baked the whole thing covered for 20 minutes than uncovered for another 20, or maybe 30... i think i may have left it in there a little longer than that, because i was watching ...ahem castle, and didn't hear the oven beep. oops. still turned out good though. got the family to critique it and they thought it was pretty yummy minus the size of the eggplant slices. hehe. (that would be the result of buying the wrong type of eggplant and my laziness).

   looks good, no?

     okey dokes, two changes i would make to the recipe:

1. peel the eggplant. (recipe didn't mention if i was supposed to or not.) 

2. purge the eggplant and let it sit longer. 1-2 hours minimum.

     all in all, the eggplant parm was pretty good. three stars out of five for yummy factor. i have what i call a thursday tummy now. hehe. oh, and i'll give another three stars for easy to follow recipe. alright, time to go run a few laps and do some sit-ups. bleh.