I’ve missed you!

Wow, it’s been quite some time since I’ve blogged. I haven’t given up on blogging, nor have I gone off the wagon and started eating meat, or gotten on the wagon and stopped drinking beer (God forbid!).

No, instead, I’ve just been really, really, busy.

I most recently blogged before going away on a service trip to Boston. I go on this trip every year, and, I even got celebrities to guest-post for me last year. This year, I didn’t really ask for any help, thinking that I could manage to keep posing, and get my page loaded up with enough posts that I could keep posing and never miss a beat.

How’d that work out for me?

So, when I returned from Boston, I was already out of the habit of blogging, so. . . I stayed out of the habit. Well, now that I’ve started teaching at a new school, had a birthday, seen Halloween, and planned to blog about a million times, it seems like it’s about time that I actually did some blogging.

I figured I could return with a beer (I mean, it’s not like I stopped drinking recently) or I could return by talking about all of the things I did this summer (service trip, home-brewer camping trip, working at summer school, taking classes), or I could post my first recipe in a million years.

Well, since posting should be something pretty immediate (which leaves out most of what I did over the summer) and I feel like all I blogged about for the six months before I vanished off of the face of the Earth was beer, maybe I should post a recipe that I enjoy for the nights when it’s getting cooler and cooler, and that has sufficient flair to serve to your significant other: eggplant parmigiana.

This recipe is modified from Mario Batali’s recipe on food.com, so all credit should go to an amazing chef, not to me.

Ingredients:
1 medium eggplant
1/2 cup world’s best pasta sauce
1/4 cup Daiya mozzarella
1/8 cup breadcrumbs
Vegan parmesean
Salt
Pepper
Italian spices (basil, oregano, parsley, etc.)

First, slice the eggplant into 1″ rounds and lay them out on a cooling rack. Using kosher salt, heavily salt the eggplant on both sides, and leave out for 1-2 hours. You’ll want to put a cookie sheet under the cooling rack to catch the salt add you spread it and the water as it drips off of the eggplant.

(I know there’s some disagreement on whether or not to salt eggplant, but I feel like it makes a huge difference in the tatte and texture on the eggplant. It firms it up for cooking and gives it a little bit more umami flavor. But don’t take my word for it. Look it up.)

Pre-heat the oven to 450°.

Rinse the eggplant really well to get all of the salt off it, and squeeze it well. You want to ensure that the eggplant has as little moisture in it as possible.

Lay the eggplant down on a cookie sheet and spray it with spray oil. Bake it for 15 minutes.

When the eggplant is done, take it out and turn the oven down to 405°. Lay the largest eggplant rounds in a baking dish and spoon on about 1 Tbsp of pasta sauce. Shake some seasonings onto the sauce, and then sprinkle a scant Tbsp of the Daiya on top. Repeat this with the next two rounds. You should end up with three towers of eggplant, about three or four rings high.

After the third round, top it with the sauce and cheese, and then sprinkle the top with the breadcrumbs and vegan parmesean.

Bake the eggplant at 405° for about 20 minutes. (Remember that Daiya melts at 400° and above) Once the breadcrumbs are browned, the eggplant is done.

This recipe looks way more time and work intensive than it really is and scales up really easily. Make it for an evening when you have someone to impress and let me know how it goes.

And thanks for coming back!

~ by VegansHusband on November 10, 2014.