A dash of *&#@!
I cooked eggplant parmesan for dinner. Mmmmm. I love eggplant parmesan. And I know that it will be delish because of all the swearing that went into it!
I used a new recipe this time. Generally I use the one from the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. It's the slacker version: Fry eggplant, place in pan with store-bought marinara sauce & pre-grated cheese, bake. Today I tried the eggplant parmesan from the reknowned Italian cookbook Ben gave me for Christmas, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Its recipe is, not surprisingly, a little more involved. It has you brine the eggplant. It uses fresh cheese that you grate and slice yourself. It has fresh basil (it was this ingredient that convinced me to try the new recipe). And it has quite a lot of strife going into the preparation!
Ok, all of the strife was in the eggplant-frying phase. I've never enjoyed frying things. I'm terrible at it. I think you really need a deep fryer for it to work well. It's a guaranteed farce with our not-remotely-level burners and my reticence towards using much oil. But it was even more problematic this time than eggplant parmesan has ever been before. Probably that's because this recipe uses more eggplant than the one I'm used to. It's only natural for it to be twice as bad to fry twice as much eggplant.
Much of the shouting would have been avoided if the smoke alarm hadn't kept going off. The whole "when there's smoke there's fire" assumption is categorically untrue, especially when it's just a little innocent cooking smoke =D. They should really make smart smoke detectors that discriminate between different types of smoke. There's definitely a lot of variation in the way smoke smells. Wood smoke smells nothing like cigarette smoke. And all those incenses smell different too. I'm sure that eggplant smoke is nothing like house-burning-down smoke. Smoke detectors should ignore food smoke. (Unless, of course, you live in a gingerbread house.) Especially since going off while cooking only ensures that your food will burn even more while you're running around opening windows, turning on fans, and doing a wafting/fanning dance underneath the blasted thing.
Anyway, the parmesan was yummy, of course. There's really no doubt for eggplant parmesan. It's just that good! But I wonder if it would really lose much if you just skipped that whole frying step. The fried breading isn't really the selling point of this dish. All the melted cheese is! So what do you need the frying for? Does it make it crispier? This version has you stack the eggplant like a lasagna, so it ended up being pretty soggy anyway. I really wonder if you'd even notice a difference if you used un-fried eggplant. Perhaps it would need to bake longer? I don't know. This one baked for 35 minutes at 400, which really should be adequate to cook thin slices of raw eggplant. What do you think?
I used a new recipe this time. Generally I use the one from the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. It's the slacker version: Fry eggplant, place in pan with store-bought marinara sauce & pre-grated cheese, bake. Today I tried the eggplant parmesan from the reknowned Italian cookbook Ben gave me for Christmas, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Its recipe is, not surprisingly, a little more involved. It has you brine the eggplant. It uses fresh cheese that you grate and slice yourself. It has fresh basil (it was this ingredient that convinced me to try the new recipe). And it has quite a lot of strife going into the preparation!
Ok, all of the strife was in the eggplant-frying phase. I've never enjoyed frying things. I'm terrible at it. I think you really need a deep fryer for it to work well. It's a guaranteed farce with our not-remotely-level burners and my reticence towards using much oil. But it was even more problematic this time than eggplant parmesan has ever been before. Probably that's because this recipe uses more eggplant than the one I'm used to. It's only natural for it to be twice as bad to fry twice as much eggplant.
Much of the shouting would have been avoided if the smoke alarm hadn't kept going off. The whole "when there's smoke there's fire" assumption is categorically untrue, especially when it's just a little innocent cooking smoke =D. They should really make smart smoke detectors that discriminate between different types of smoke. There's definitely a lot of variation in the way smoke smells. Wood smoke smells nothing like cigarette smoke. And all those incenses smell different too. I'm sure that eggplant smoke is nothing like house-burning-down smoke. Smoke detectors should ignore food smoke. (Unless, of course, you live in a gingerbread house.) Especially since going off while cooking only ensures that your food will burn even more while you're running around opening windows, turning on fans, and doing a wafting/fanning dance underneath the blasted thing.
Anyway, the parmesan was yummy, of course. There's really no doubt for eggplant parmesan. It's just that good! But I wonder if it would really lose much if you just skipped that whole frying step. The fried breading isn't really the selling point of this dish. All the melted cheese is! So what do you need the frying for? Does it make it crispier? This version has you stack the eggplant like a lasagna, so it ended up being pretty soggy anyway. I really wonder if you'd even notice a difference if you used un-fried eggplant. Perhaps it would need to bake longer? I don't know. This one baked for 35 minutes at 400, which really should be adequate to cook thin slices of raw eggplant. What do you think?
Labels: food
posted by Meg at
7:20 PM
2 Comments:
Yay, you're using the cookbook! I'm so happy!
-Ben
By
Anonymous, at March 05, 2006 9:37 PM
BTW, I hate frying eggplant too. My best results have been using a huge pan so I don't have to do too many batches before the crumbs burn and smoke up everything...-Ben
By
Anonymous, at March 05, 2006 9:39 PM
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