Eggplant Parmesan

It's been a busy week and I haven't gotten round to cooking much. Okay, I did cook yesterday but that was just caramelized leek quiche and a pumpkin pie. The first I've already posted and the second... well let me say that no one except me enjoyed it :( Unfortunate for the "others" they are stuck with it for dessert until it is over :)
Today was busy too but the eggplant was not going to last much longer. I figured eggplant Parmesan would be a good option to use it up. I search for the recipe on food.com (that's where I first found the recipe). But oh my, our internet connection has been really slow for many websites (thank goodness not blogger) and I could not download the recipe. I had to kind of go at it blind. So what you have here is not a traditional eggplant Parmesan but some modified version of it!

Serves 8; Preparation time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Ingredients

1 kg	Eggplant
	Salt for sprinkling
1	Egg
1 tbsp.	Flour
3 tbsp.	Milk
2 cups	Bread crumbs
	Oil for frying
800 ml	Pasta sauce (tomato)
3 tbsp.	Cream
1/4 cup	Basil leaves (loosely packed)
2 tbsp.	Thyme
125 g	Fresh mozzarella
1/2 cup	Grated Parmesan

Method:

I'd decided on eggplant Parmesan pretty early in the afternoon. So I took a break from my work and sliced the eggplant into slices about 1 cm thick. (Note this is a European eggplant so it's big and fat. If you have the Asian variety I would slice it lengthwise instead of crosswise.) Then I sprinkled it liberally with salt and put it in a colander to rest. I went back to work and literally forgot about it!

Next there was the rush... 15 minutes to move dinner along before running out of the house to pick up my youngest one from Viola lessons. What could I possibly get done in 15 minutes and without a recipe? So I just guessed. I put two skillets on the cooker on high heat (with one I was never going to be done in time). Then I washed the salt off the eggplant and beat up an egg with some flour and milk. I didn't measure anything precisely but I know that I used 2 heaped teaspoons of flour, which is probably the same as in the ingredients above. I must have put about 3 tablespoons of milk in. But you know what, it's not a precise science. I just needed something that would stick the breadcrumbs to the eggplant. Anything that you use to make a cutlet or Chinese roll should do too. I do believe that the egg makes it crunchy so don't leave that out. 

To fry eggplant you need a lot of oil. There is something about eggplant that makes it only taste good if it is doused in oil! So I poured some oil into the pan then one by one patted the eggplant dry with a kitchen towel, to remove some of the dampness so that the batter adheres better, dipped them in the batter then into the breadcrumbs and fried them. When I turned them I added extra oil to the pan else the breadcrumbs would not become golden brown. And I reduced the heat else the breadcrumbs start burning and that is a mess. Here is what they looked like:

It took me 15 minutes to finish all of them and get out of the house. I was in time to pick up my child. Phew!!

Once I got home again I had to put everything together. I first set the oven to 160 Celsius and then got to work. I picked my largest casserole dish and poured in about 300 ml of pasta sauce from a jar. Then I arranged the fried eggplant on top of it. Since I had so much eggplant I put two layers of eggplant. Then I used the cream to clean out the empty pasta sauce jar and poured that on top.

There were some herbs that still had not died! A basil plant, which is on it's last legs and the thyme plant which was bought for the quiche. Actually the thyme has been doing really well since I started watering it. I didn't bother picking off the leaves of the thyme because the stalks were really soft so I just kind of broke it up over the dish. I did the same with the basil leaves (no stalks please!).

Then the rest of the tomato sauce was poured over and evenly distributed. Finally on went the cheese. The fresh Mozzarella was shredded and the Parmesan finely grated. All of this was popped in the oven for around 30 to 40 minutes. At some point I felt like the cheese was not browning quickly enough so I increased the temperature by 10 degrees. This helped speed up the cooking.

And while that all was cooking I managed to clean up the kitchen and make some pasta to eat with it. I took the opportunity to finish the linguine that I used for the half an hour pasta with mushroom dish. You can also eat it with bread or rice and serve a nice green salad with it if you want to be fancy.