Posts Tagged Eggplant
Spinach and Tomato Eggplant Steak with Dill Rice
Posted by Van Santos in Main Course, Vegetarian Entree on December 15th, 2009
With some leftover Feta cheese sitting in the Fridge I thought I would do a Mediterranean-esque dish. Here is something I have to admit – I’ve never consumed eggplant in my 32 years on this planet.
Scary, huh?
That said, I truly had no clue as to what I was doing, I just went with what seemed right.
I used:
1 package of frozen spinach
2 small vine ripened tomatoes
1 tablespoon minced garlic
½ cup bread crumbs
¼ cup feta cheese
fresh parsley
fresh oregano
1 nice sized eggplant
olive oil
1) Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees
2) Cut your eggplant into four steak, roughly one inch thick. At olive oil to a frying pan and brown the egg plant on each side for one to two minutes. Set aside eggplant steaks
3) Defrost your spinach, chop your tomatoes. Using the same frying pan add additional olive oil, sauté the spinach, tomatoes, minced garlic, parsley and oregano. Use the amount of parsley and oregano you see fit. Also, salt and pepper to your taste
4) Place your eggplant onto a foiled cookie sheet, spoon on your spinach mixture.
5) Mix the Feta cheese and bread crumbs together, sprinkle over the spinach mix on the eggplant and bake for 25 minutes
While the eggplant was in the oven I quickly whipped up some dill rice.
2 cups of white rice
2 cups of chicken broth
1 cup of freshly cut dill
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
This is quite easy to do, just…
1) Bring the chicken broth to a boil
2) Add rice and lemon juice, stir
3) Add dill, stir
4) Cover and cook over low heat until rice is at your desired tenderness
Eggplant steak goodness!
OH WOW. This is the second vegetarian dish in two weeks that has really, really impressed me. The eggplant didn’t have the flavor or texture I expected, and the “stuff” complimented the aftertaste of the fruit. And the dill rice tied everything together… I mean, come on, it’s dill rice!
Also, the spinach/tomato mix could be used for so many things…Actually, it could seem some variant of this being for a pita or chip “dip”… maybe even for stuffed mushrooms.
In the end I capped the entire meal off with a slice of the Cinnamon and Brown Sugar cake and I was in heaven.
All and all a good turnout for a “let’s throw something together” dish.
Ground beef and eggplant lasagna
Posted by monicajane in Food, Main Course, Pasta on August 9th, 2009
I took a whole bunch of pictures of the process of this lasagna and managed to leave out the layer of eggplant!! How very annoying.
Here is the progression, sans eggplant. First a layer of pasta, then the first layer of meat sauce.
Then a hefty layer of parmesan:
Then a layer of cultured cottage cheese (yes it’s got a bit of a yogurt flavor)
Then the layer of EGGPLANT that is missing then you repeat the whole thing (the second time I did not put eggplant as the first layer was pretty thick–I sliced them in circles and lay them down on top of the cottage cheese) Then this is the finished product before cooking. After the second layer I finish with a layer of pasta and then just s tiny bit of sauce and cheese to top it off lightly:
This is overflowing so I put it on a cookie rack in the oven.
So the recipe:
Red meat sauce
1 lb grass fed beef (I have a very inexpensive source for organic ground beef so I’m eating red meat a whole lot more than I used to!)
1 small onion
3 cloves garlic
14 oz can diced tomatoes (these happen to have roasted hot peppers in them so the sauce will be spicy!)
1/4 cup frozen pesto sauce (from our garden)
Salt to taste
Saute onion and garlic in a bit of olive oil. Toss in beef and brown. Pour in can of tomatoes and the pesto sauce. Cook just long enough for flavors to blend. (this is a meat heavy sauce…I don’t like heavy tomato in my lasagna)
So I cooked the lasagna pasta before I started all this. I used brown rice lasagna pasta. I only cook the noodles for about 5 minutes. I take them out when they are still very firm as they cook a lot in the oven and aid in keeping the lasagna firm and not watery.
Also before putting this together brush slices of eggplant with oil and put under broiler for a couple of minutes until soft.
I placed one layer of pasta at the bottom of the dish then put a layer of meat sauce, followed by a generous amount of parmesan, followed by a layer of cottage cheese then a layer of eggplant.
Repeat.
Finish with a last layer of pasta, a very small bit of sauce, parmesan and lastly I put a small layer of mozzarella for looks.
Cook for (I just went to check on it) it was perfectly done and took about 50 minutes. I did not heat the oven up first though so go by how it looks on top…nice and lightly browned, like this:
It did not overflow. You can of course use a cheese other than the cultured cottage cheese. I used it simply because it needed to be eaten and I cook completely based on what is currently in my fridge.
Eggplant Parmesan, Salsa is not Spaghetti Sauce
Posted by JT in Main Course, Recipes on April 4th, 2009
I belong to a CSA, where every Saturday they drop of a bag of fresh produce from the farm at my front door. What I receive in that bag every Saturday informs what I will be cooking for the next week. I find that it forces me to be creative and use ingredients I wouldn’t normally use. Recently I got an eggplant, so my mind immediately went to either ratatouille or eggplant parmesan, since I had fresh pasta and some pecorino in my fridge I decided on eggplant parm.
The problem was I didn’t have spaghetti sauce or the ingredients to make it (I usually make it, garlic, basil, oregano, crushed tomatoes, red wine.) Looking in my fridge I realized that I did have an abundance of fresh salsa from the deli section of my grocery store. I looked at the ingredients, tomatoes, onion, green chile, then a bunch of, contains less than 2% of… I thought, mistakenly, that I would be able to transform this salsa into a pasta sauce. I sautéed onion, garlic and a little carrot, added the salsa, added massive amounts of basil, sundried tomatoes, oregano and garlic salt. Brought the whole thing to a boil then simmered for 45 minutes. The whole house had the wonderful smell of pasta sauce, but for some reason the tomatoes in the salsa never broke down, they stayed hard little dices (how unripe would they have to be to maintain this structure?) and most importantly they never lost their acidic zing that says “salsa.” It tasted like spaghetti sauce with a bunch of lime juice added. In the end I had to go out and buy the ingredients to make a fresh batch of sauce.
Eggplant Parmesan
1 Eggplant
Salt
8 oz pasta
Pasta sauce
2 Eggs
Breadcrumbs
Flour
Olive oil
Pecorino or Parmesan
Fresh parsley
1. 24 hours in advance slice your eggplant and salt liberally on both sides, place on a baking sheet with paper towels on both sides and place another baking sheet on top. This forces some of the liquid out of the eggplant and removes some of the bitter flavor it can have.
2. Fill a large pot with water and really salt the water. I always heard it should taste like sea water, and my pasta never tasted great until I realized just how salty the water should be. If you use enough salt then your pasta will taste great plain. Bring the water to a boil.
3. Set up a breading station. 1 plate with flour on it, 1 plate with the 2 eggs beaten, 1 plate with a mixture of the bread crumbs and some of the parmesan. Bread your eggplant slices, into the flour, into the egg into the breadcrumbs.
4. In a pan, pour enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan. When the oil starts to shimmer add in the slices of eggplant. Cook until golden brown on one side, then flip. Once they are cooked on both sides set on paper towels to drain. They should be crunchy on the outside and creamy in the middle.
5. When your water is boiling add your pasta, I am lucky enough to get fresh pasta from a local source so the pasta cooks in 1 minute.
6. Drain the pasta
7. Assemble the dish – Pasta, Sauce, Eggplant, Cheese, Parsley
