Al Abut

Al's Low Carb And Gooey Eggplant Parmesan Recipe

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Last night, I tried an experiment and made up my own recipe for eggplant parmesan, and afterwards, made a couple of friends curious with this status update on twitter and facebook: "proud to have scored a perfect 10 (not my words!) on tonight's dinner, so maybe I should publish the secret recipe I invented :)"

So here it is! Warning, this may be low-carb but extremely buttery.

Ingredients:

• eggplant (duh)
• parmesan (DUH)
• butter
• pepper or cracked pepper
• provolone
• fresh mozzarella (the real stuff - you know, the kind you see sitting in plastic tubs of liquid over by the rest of the fancy cheeses. string cheese does not count!)
• two tomatoes (go for the yellow kind if you can find it, it's super sweet and firm)
• optional: one of those big bags of broccoli and cauliflower and the ziplock steam bags

Directions:

First, you take an eggplant, cut it into big thick horizontal rings (like burger patties) and pan fry or saute them in boatloads of butter and cracked pepper. The eggplant's really good about absorbing all of that butter, so it's hard to burn it, but still keep an eye out. Takes just a few minutes.

At the same time, fire up the oven to 350 degrees. Or, if you want that San Francisco tiny apartment feeling and would like to replicate my exact setup - fire up the toaster oven.

As if you didn't have enough to do, warm up some marina on a different little sauce pan. Try to pick the kind w/ less than 5 grams of carbs - it's usually the fancy-actually-Italian kind, not the Americanized Ragu and all of their extra added sugar. But even the Italian stuff isn't good enough, so we've got to doctor it up a bit. The secret is to mix in some parmesan (it thickens it up) and to add your own herbs, like oregano - the stock stuff straight out of the can is made to appeal to absolutely everybody and is therefore a bit average, not quite spicy enough. A former coworker of mine mentioned some super-insulated relatives in the midwest that consider spaghetti to be ethnic food - don't be these people, make it tasty.

Bonus points for NPR nerds: watch this video of Malcolm Gladwell speaking at TED and explaining the art & science behind making spaghetti sauce for the mass marketplace. Do not do said video watching while cooking. Or go ahead, I won't be liable for your kitchen burning down.

One more thing to do while Our Friend The Eggplant is still doing God's work by absorbing every last drop of butter: cut the tomatoes and mozzarella into thick rings also.

Once the eggplant rings are nice and soft, here comes the construction project. Put down a cooking sheet on a baking tray and carpet bomb a layer of Pam onto the fucker like you're going to fumigate the place. Then, layer in rings of eggplant with different ingredients sandwiched in, like so: eggplant, mozzarella, eggplant, tomato, eggplant, provolone, eggplant, etc. That's probably as high as you can go, about 3-5 layers of the stuff, before it starts to topple. Bring the saucepan over and cover each towering eggplant sandwich you made (I got two big ones and two small ones from one bigass looks-like-Quentin-Tarantino's-giant-head eggplant).

Then, just when you thought you were finished, completely cover the top ring layer with parmesan. You can use the fancy shredded kind but for some completely unfathomable reason, I actually prefer the shitty mass-produced grated kind. It's kind of inexcusable for someone that worked a few hours a week at a cheese shop in Hillcrest a few years ago just to learn more about the stuff - I'm sorry George! - and I can't explain it. Best part about working in a cheese shop: on the shifts that George and I worked together, we'd occassionally order some pizza and grate some fresh parmesan on it directly off of one of those big semitruck wheel-sized blocks it comes in. No joke, they use chainsaws to cut the stuff at the creamery where it's made.

So yeah, as I was saying, completely cover it in parmesan, completely. I mean turn that bottle upside down and spank it hard, make a little caked-up circle of the stuff sitting on top.

Put the whole creation in the tiny toaster oven and curse the rental agency that won't fix the stinky oven in the kitchen. I mean, wait about 20 minutes. No rush, you can even turn down the heat after 20 and leave it on "warm" like I did for about 10 while reparking the car. It's like making ribs - the oven part just makes everything nice and gooey.

Throw some veggies into one of those microwaveable steam bags for a side dish and wallah! You're done!