Teenage Eggplant Dinner
My son and his girlfriend came into the house last night just as I was putting out a beautiful dinner of sweet potatoes, greens, asparagus and scallops. They turned down an offer to join us for dinner.
"What’s wrong with my dinner? Why can’t you join us???" was my complaint and whining expression of disappointment. For a few minutes my husband and I had a conversation about dinner standards, sitting down as a family together and ''blah blah blah" and Rich asked "Do you really think he wants to eat with us? He is 16, and no matter what you cook, he doesn’t want to sit at the table on a Saturday night." Crushed! And defeated, I retreated.
We hadn’t even finished our dinner, when the percussion of pans banging and the symphony of dinner-making came from the kitchen. Then I started getting requests for tips and advice on how to cook the eggplant and was there any tomatoes and what kind of oil was there to use and I felt useful and all was right.
They had bought an eggplant and some parmesan cheese, but there weren’t any tomatoes…
What a gift to have them in the kitchen making their own dinner, vegetarian no less, and mostly healthy, and WOW! Their end-result was wildly delicious - jeez, life with teenagers!
Here is their recipe straight off the press:
Indian Style Eggplant
One eggplant, sliced into ½” rounds2 cups coconut oilone jar Seeds of Change,Jalfrezi simmer sauce (a medium hot tomato curry sauce)1.5 cups shredded mozzarella
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Sprinkle the slices of eggplant with salt and allow the bitter juices to come out (20-30 minutes). Rinse slices and pat dry with a clean towel. Heat coconut oil to 350 and “fry “ the eggplant rounds in oil. As soon as the rounds are crispy, remove from the pan and set on a cookie sheet with parchment paper (easy clean up afterwards). Spoon a tablespoon of the simmer sauce on the top of each round and sprinkle each round with some cheese. Place in the oven until the cheese melts.
(Serve with already made asparagus and salad!)