Week 10: Eggplant and Zucchini Parmesan

This week's recipe was extra-special for a few reasons. First of all, my entire immediate family (mom, dad, brother, and sister) was present for the tasting of the meal. Secondly, I was graced with the opportunity to cook the high-stakes-medal-round Saturday Dinner. Saturday Dinner is the mother of all dinners. You go big or go home on Saturday. To explain, we started making special meals on Saturday because that was one of the only nights of the week my dad used to be home. Now that he works first shift, he is home every night, but we still like to cook "fancy" dishes on Saturdays because it's a lot of fun. Normally it's a big to-do and very involved and all that, so I'll admit that I was a bit nervous to have been passed the torch for this week. However, my family is very helpful and obliging, so they make it very low-pressure. I love them so much for that, among sundry other reasons. Finally, this meal was the first I have cooked out of the cookbooks that I brought home with me from my 10 weeks in London last school year. These four cookbooks, from the Hamlyn line of color cookbooks, were really the first additions to a rapidly growing collection of culinary tomes. I guess I haven't used them yet because most of the recipes are in metric, which is a little daunting (plus a lot of the ingredients are not readily available in the U.S.--caster sugar and passata, for instance). I thought a simple meal of eggplant and zucchini Parmesan (AKA "aubergine and courgette Parmigiana," to the Brits, who prefer more French-sounding terms for their food...which is a whole can of worms in itself given the long-standing cultural tensions between the British and the French).

That being said, I did have to adapt the recipe a little bit to suit my American equipment and to suit the food stocked at American grocery stores. I will say that this adaptation process was a lot easier than I thought it would be, and I think you can get good results, too, irrespective of the lack of British equipment and British food staples.

The original recipe comes from pages 180-181 the book entitled 200 Italian favourites by Marina Filipelli, part of the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook line. This is the essential recipe supplemented with my changes.

Ingredients (the recipe takes about an hour and a half to make):
2 eggplants, sliced lengthwise (so you get long pieces)
4 zucchini, sliced lengthwise (same deal)
1 can of tomato sauce
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 handful of fresh basil, torn into rough chunks
 Dried basil flakes (estimate to taste how much you would like)
2 large-ish cloves of garlic, minced
4 tablespoons of olive oil
Grapeseed oil for frying the veggies (basically as much as you need to do the job properly)
10 ounces of fresh mozzarella cheese, chopped into 1 cm x 1 cm cubes (eyeball it)
3-4 ounces of freshly-grated Parmesan cheese (plus extra for topping, if you wish)
Salt and pepper, to taste (your choice of salt and pepper, see the Note below)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine the tomato sauce and diced tomatoes in a pan with the garlic, salt, pepper, both the fresh and dried basil, and half the olive oil. Simmer on medium-low heat until the veggies are ready (this will allow the flavors to meld nicely).

2. Slice the vegetables as indicated above. Toss in the other half of the oil. Heat grapeseed oil (or a cooking oil of your choice) in a frying pan on high heat. Saute the vegetables in batches for about 90 seconds per side and set the finished vegetables on a separate plate (I used a nice pair of tongs to make flipping the pieces over a little bit easier).

3. Coat the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch pan with a thin layer of the sauce mixture. Add a layer of mixed vegetables. Sprinkle with 1/3 of the chopped mozzarella cheese. Top with another layer of sauce, followed by 1/3 of the Parmesan cheese. Repeat these steps until all of the cheese and vegetables are used up. Make sure that the very top of the dish is finished with a layer of sauce and the rest of the Parmesan cheese.

4. Place the dish in the oven and cook 25-30 minutes (or until golden and bubbly).

Note: I got about three layers out of the ingredients, just for some reference. Also, we served this dish with some Italian sausage links (pork and chicken mix), rigatoni with tomato sauce, salad, and bread. These are just some suggestions for how to serve the dish and are by no means requirements (they also made it a pretty involved meal that I will not be cooking very often). Thanks to Mom and everyone else for helping me with these extras! You really saved me a lot of time and effort! Finally, I used regular salt in the sauce, but I see no reason why onion salt would not be a good alternative. Actually, I was thinking about adding it this first time, but I sort of forgot and used plain table salt instead. I will definitely try the onion salt route next time (and maybe ground white pepper instead of black pepper, too).

One thing I would change about this recipe is maybe to cook the dish just a few minutes longer because I never achieved that nice golden-brown cheesy topping that is shown in the book (or maybe cook it on a bit higher setting, like 375 degrees). However, everything tasted really wonderful, so maybe this is a less-important area for improvement.

This is more of the browning I was hoping for. See below for an idea of how light mine was. Oh, well. I guess it's good to have ideals to aim for. Photo courtesy of confessionsofafoodlover2012.blogspot.com.

Also, the time that I have listed for cooking the veggies is my revised timing based on my experience. The book recommends 2-3 minutes per side on a griddle pan, but I just used a large frying pan, and I thought that the 2-3 minutes per side was too much.

If you want to know how the changes I've propose here worked out, see my re-do of the recipe during Week 16: http://frataliangirl.blogspot.com/2013/06/week-16-re-do-of-eggplant-and-zucchini.html.

All in all, everyone loved the dish. I thought the sauce turned out excellently and was the perfect accompaniment to the fresh vegetables and cheese. I would make the sauce this way again, even if it were just for topping pasta and eating alone if I were cooking for myself. This is another recipe that I will enjoy eating later in the summer when homegrown zucchini and farm-fresh eggplant are more readily available locally.

One thing I especially enjoyed about the whole thing was that the steps are very simple, and the result looks and tastes like it took a lot more time and energy than it really did. I'm guessing this would be a great date-night dinner if you want an easy way to impress that special someone (or as a birthday dinner for someone you really care about). In addition to all of that, this is a really healthful recipe, chock-full of delicious and nutrition-packed vegetables. It makes you feel really good to eat it! Add a salad, and you've got a supercharged recipe for health!

Mom came up with a great idea for leftovers; just take the vegetables and slice them up into bite-sized pieces, then mix with any remaining pasta (or some freshly cooked pasta), sprinkle with more Parmesan, and cook in the oven to create a nice baked pasta dish. Cook once, eat twice!

This week was also a really great learning experience for me. Not only was this my first time cooking sausage, but I also realized that water does not have to be at a rolling boil to cook tasty al dente pasta. I'm quite the goody-two-shoes rule follower, so I would never have tried to cook pasta before the water was boiling. However, my family got pretty hungry toward the end of my cooking period, so my mom told me I could hurry things along by adding the pasta once the water was scalding hot but not yet at a good boil. I love learning ways to cut corners and be more efficient, so I was thankful for the tip from my culinary role model.

To finish, I was honored to be able to cook the week's special meal for my whole family. We had a lot of fun talking and enjoying the (finally!) nice spring weather here in Minnesota. My family talked on the deck while I cooked and joined in the conversation from the window in the kitchen that overlooks the deck. This is a dish, I think, that really brings people together and represents how comforting Italian food is for me (and how comforting I hope it can be for other people). This was by far my biggest undertaking, and I think I proved to myself that I can succeed in cooking a wide variety of dishes. I'm eager to see what culinary lessons I learn next time around. Until then...happy eating!

Healthful never tasted or looked so good! Photo enhanced with Instagram filtering.