Hella Mozzarella

We apologize for the unannounced hiatus from food blogging last week.  Tony and I went on a little backpacking excursion, during which we ate naught but freeze-dried lasagna packets and drank naught but bitter instant coffee.  It was a foodie's worst nightmare and so we shall not speak of it, but instead get right to this week's meal, which is one that I can truly get behind.  First off, our recipe of choice is mainly cheese.  There are some veggies and spices thrown in for good measure, but it's mostly cheese.  If I didn't mention it in my food philosophy: CHEESE!  'Nuff said.  Furthermore, this week we introduce something that has been sorely lacking from our cooking adventures, namely, dessert.  Again, I may have failed to mention my love for all things sugary in my food philosophy, but let's just say that sometimes I eat "real" food simply so that I can feel justified in eating a big ol' plate of carrot cake, ice cream, or anything drenched in chocolate.  I'm still not sure exactly how that logic works, but in any case, I LOVE desserts and am quite fond on baking.  So all in all, this is a meal I got very excited about.

I don't eat a lot of bread or cheese, for paranoid health reasons, not because I don't love them.  I do love them, but more than bread, though less than cheese, I LOVE eggplant (to clarify, the hierarchy of love looks like this bread<eggplant<cheese).  Though eggplant seizes the throne whenever it's prepared with basil and black bean sauce at Thai restaurants.  I know what you're thinking, or what you will be thinking after I suggest you were thinking about it: how can you LOVE eggplant?  I love it because it's a selfless, yet bold fruit (yes, it's a fruit, don't get me started).  It cooks down to a texture that can only be described as mushy, yet it somehow makes mushy a positive by absorbing whatever flavors it comes into contact with and adding it's own sweet earthiness.  So I was excited by the recipe planned for this week.

Behold:  The Tuscan Eggplant Parmigiana.  It's canned tomatoes, basil, oregano, eggplant, mozzarella, and parmesan all put into a big pot.  That's it.  I'd actually made this recipe once before after stumbling upon it on some food blog or other, so I knew that it was super delicious, but this time Tony and I decided to do it a little differently by breading the eggplant with egg and flour (is it still called breading if you don't use bread crumbs?) before frying them.  In hindsight, I feel like the breading actually stopped the eggplant from absorbing some of the great flavors in the pot (basil, garlic, oregano, CHEESE) because I remember the dish being a tad more flavorful the first time around.  So anyway, my advice would be to follow the instructions (I mean, who do we think we are anyway messing with a recipe?) and make sure that your pan is very hot when you fry the eggplant so's it doesn't soak up tooo much of the oil, even though it's gonna be oily no matter what (yum).

Topping the loooooong list of "seemingly simple cooking techniques that I always screw up" is frying.  I usually bake my eggplant parmigiana in order to take a cowardly stance against frying, but eggplant is just so good with a little breading that Karen and I decided to go for it.  I used some egg and flour instead of going the extra bread crumb mile.  Everything was going well, my little eggplant slices were sweated (sweating refers to salting the eggplant cutlets and letting them sit, allowing the bitter juices to seep out), egged and floured and smiling waiting to be popped into the oven for a nice warm sauna of yumminess to finish a veritable full spa treatment.  Instead they found themselves plunged into a half inch of under-heated oil in a mishapen skillet where they slowly absorbed oil and occasionally found patches area hot enough to fry in.  Sorry, eggplant buddies.  Don't get me wrong, it turned out pretty good, but eggplant can be a fickle fruit, so don't you dare cross it.

Tony Note: I see a disappointed face in each oil soaked cutlet.

While Tony's spirit was being crushed by eggplant and a misshapen skillet (that's my bad, probably time to invest in some quality cookware) I had the incredibly easy job of opening a can, chopping some basil and garlic, shredding some cheese, and putting stuff in a pot.

Karen Note: I see a food surface that needs to be covered in CHEESE!


Because my job was so easy, I also whipped up some rosemary bread à la Macaroni Grill.

It was okay.  I mean, it was bread and it had rosemary and it was covered in butter (awesome), but for my money there is no better at-home bread recipe than No Knead Bread.  So I think next time I'll just add some rosemary to that bad boy and call it a day . . . or two days since it take about 20 hours to rise and get all bread-like.

As you can see, we couldn't wait the 10 seconds it takes to get a picture to devour the bread.  So although this meal may not look that appetizing (sorry for the stained table cloth) it was pretty awesome, really easy, and very filling.


Oh, but it's not over!  The food part was so simple that we decided to invest our extra time in some strawberry shortcake, one of my favorite desserts.  Karen and I got into a spat over this dish as we are wont to do.  Though less heated than past squabbles, "Bake Vs. Fry", "Mince Vs. Chop" or "More Chocolate Vs. No, Karen, we can't fit anymore chocolate in this," the question of "Biscuit Vs. Angel food cake" was nonetheless contentious.  I swear by a Martha Stewart recipe that involves buttery, crumbly biscuits as the proper strawberry vessels, but I've never tried angel food cake.  Karen, having tried my recipe, swore that the lighter and more pious option was better.  I was skeptical, but excited to put this to the test.  Unfortunately, angel food cake required a level of precision and technique that we didn't feel comfortable with, so we settled on Hot Milk Sponge Cake.  This would prove a poor decision, something the less than appetizing title should have warned us of.


While I still maintain that angel food cake is the ONLY way to do strawberry shortcake, I'm ashamed to say that I took one look at the complicated, finicky instructions in my BH&G Cookbook ("Make sure your utensils are clean.  The smallest amount of oil or fat on beaters or a mixing bowl will compromise the volume of the beaten egg whites."  WHAAA?) and I just plain chickened out.  One day I hope to conquer the more delicate baking techniques such as adding sugar "when soft peaks form," but for now I just wanted cake, so I went with a recipe that I'd used previously for tiramisu.


Karen gets right to work fudging things up by mixing the ingredients in the wrong order.  I hate to think what hellish beast would have emerged from that oven if we had gone with the angel food cake recipe.

While Karen handled measuring, mixing and any task that might involve higher level thinking, I cut up strawberries and poured sugar all over them.  And I done it real well.  Promise.  

QUIZ: Which plate was prepared by a person with enough patience and forethought to consider what the photo would look like and which was prepared by a thumbless monkey? 

Trick question, I do TOO have thumbs.  I was just excited.

A final word of wisdom: not a single dessert doesn't benefit from a pinch of salt.  It brings out the flavor, and when you decide to make Hot Milk Sponge Cake, you need to coax out every bit of flavor you can.  

Okay, you know that cake was totally delicious when it was covered in sugary strawberry syrup and homemade whipped cream.  Just because it tasted a little hot and kinda milky and spongey . . . well, just shut up.

This meal had its flaws, indeed.  Just like babies, they don't always turn out quite right.  As always, though, Karen and I had tons of fun and despite the abundance of cheese and adding salt to the dessert, this meal was much better for you than what we could have gotten at Macaroni Grill.  I heard the water alone contains half your daily calories!