Baked Eggplant with Crusted Almond FAIL



The baked eggplant... it looks good, doesn't it?

 Roy, his daughter Ashley and I hit up the local farmer's market this past weekend, and I finally bought an eggplant. I've been thinking about making ratatouille or grilled eggplant or anything else eggplanty really. But for some reason every time I saw an eggplant, either at the grocery store or the farmers market, I didn't buy one. So finally, I decided I was going to make something and gosh darnit, the Internet was gonna help me figure out how.

Me at the Farmer's Market. Look at the size of that cabbage!

I found this recipe on Pinterest that looked totally fab, so I decided I would make that, considering I had all the ingredients on hand. I didn't want to make the sauce though, because ideally I wanted the almond crust to stay crunchy and I thought I'd prefer it better sans sauce. I still have no idea if I would have liked this dish more if I'd have made the darn sauce but, most likely, I won't be trying this recipe again. Sorry. I'm not a quitter!! I just don't wanna.

Sliced eggplants

I'm posting about this recipe for two reasons. The first is to prove to you that I'm really not a great cook. I just follow directions, and sometimes poorly at that. I fail a lot but I just try something else. While I may give up on the recipe, I won't give up on the vegetable itself, or heaven's forbid, my lifestyle. That brings me to my second reason of posting this recipe. I failed. And it's kinda funny and sad at the same time. But it should also show you I'm not perfect. This blog won't teach you to cook. If you're anything like me, you will fail sometimes too. But keep at it. It doesn't mean all veggies are nasty. It just means you'll have to find a different way to make it taste delicious! (Or at least, not like salted feet, which is what this eggplant tasted like...)



Egg mixed with almond milk on the left, crushed almonds with paprika on the right



Moving onward. My first mistake was not salting the eggplant and leaving it on a colander. I believe it's supposed to help make the eggplant less bitter. This recipe screwed me over because it said I didn't really have to do the salting and waiting if the eggplant is young. Well, I bought it from a farmers market on Saturday and today is Monday. Seems young to me! Considering when you buy it from the grocery store, it's made its rounds through harvesting, pickup and delivery, not to mention how many days it sits in the bins until it's purchased by you. Am I right or am I right? Next time, I'm definitely salting it and leaving it out on a colander because I know it would have made a difference. I followed the rest of the recipe except that I used almond milk in the egg mixture instead of regular milk because I never buy cow's milk. I'm not a vegan and I'm not lactose intolerant; I just prefer nut milks over cow's milk for all the health benefits. There are probably no steroids in almonds but there sure as heck are in cow's milk. Unless you buy organic. But even then, unsweetened almond milk has 30 calories a cup. Ya can't beat that.



Dredging the eggplant

I also left the eggplant in the oven for longer than the required 25-30 minutes because I flipped the eggplant slices once during the cooking to get all sides nice and crispy, and, considering I let out a lot of hot air, I tacked on a few extra minutes. Maybe that killed it. I don't know. Do you?

Dredging in the almond mixture

So, the final product looked appetizing enough, but I couldn't eat it. It was too salty. Also, it was more than just salty. It hurt my throat. Maybe it was the bitterness of the eggplant combined with the saltiness. I may have over-salted the almonds. I have no idea. But I couldn't eat it.

 



Ready to go in the oven

Did I mention I didn't have manchego cheese? I read that you can substitute Parmesan cheese or sharp cheddar, so I used some Parmesan on some of the eggplant slices and sharp cheddar on the others but all of it was just bad. And it really didn't have anything to do with the cheese. So I'm just going to declare this an epic fail. I'm sorry y'all. I wish I had better news, but I ended up making myself a big ass salad and topped it off with a homemade chocolate peanut butter cake in a mug (to make myself feel better); an amazingly delicious recipe I got from www.chocolatecoveredkatie.com. You can find that recipe here and I highly recommend it. That woman is amazing and I will be discussing her recipes in more detail soon. For now, I hope you can laugh and cry with me over this monstrosity.

Not happy with the results

Keep on keepin' on!

-Kale Queen

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Update - My friend Jessica Gray was awesome enough to read this post and give me some tips about eggplant. Jessica wrote: "Quick tip - a young eggplant will be small, not very thick-skinned, and it will be completely pale inside. The more dark the seeds are, the more bitter it will be. If it's bigger than a zucchini or if it has any brownish seeds, salt it." Thank you Jessica. I will definitely remember these tips.

My friend Mikey Chmielewski also gave me some pointers: "I use eggplant a lot and have never done the salting bit. To me, it is the skin that is bitter and should be peeled. I have also found that cutting in chunks rather than the uniform slices made for better results. I'm not too familiar with almond milk - does it have a similar fat content to low fat milk? If not that makes a huge difference in a lot of recipes. Sometimes even just substituting skim milk for low fat milk will destroy an otherwise awesome execution in the kitchen."

I think I will actually attempt to try both of my friend's suggestions. It might be a fun thing to see if the chunks versus slices make the recipe better. And regular milk instead of almond milk. I figured if I'm already making eggplant with an almond crust, then using almond milk would make it even more magnificent, but I will have to try the recipe the way it was intended.

Thank you for your input guys!!!

-Kale Queen