Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Breaded Eggplant

Speaking of customizing, this one was pretty far out there even for me!  It is based on this amazing eggplant dish I used to eat at least once a week at a Tapas restaurant in Accra - yeah you heard me right, a Spanish restaurant run by an Indian in Ghana - and it was delicious.  It was lightly breaded and fried eggplant that they drizzled with honey and topped with feta cheese.

So I had an eggplant and decided it was time to try it out again.  I set up a little assembly line of egg (2 eggs with some salt and pepper in there) and about 1 cup of panko bread crumbs.  I sliced the eggplant into thin slices and then dipped each slice into the egg and coated it in breadcrumbs.  The eggplant was pretty big so I went through half of it and ran out of space on my cookie sheet and ran out of egg and panko so I left the rest for another day.

Obviously I baked it instead of frying it because I had to healthify it and am not very good at frying things.  So I put them all on a baking sheet and drizzled a little bit of olive oil onto each one.  I baked it at 375 for what ended up being about 30 minutes altogether and flipped it halfway through.  They ended up being super crunchy and delicious, which I was pretty excited about because there's nothing worse than mushy (or uncooked) eggplant and I had no idea what I was doing!

Once they were done, I took them out and put some crumbled feta (ok fine I used goat cheese but I know not everyone is a fan, but they both work well) on top and then drizzled honey over the whole thing.

In the spirit of sharing vegetable recipes, I thought I'd share this one - it will seriously surprise you - I'm going to have to start making it for people so that you'll actually give it a chance but I swear it was amazing!

Next up is eggplant parmesan because I have to do round 2 with the rest of the eggplant tomorrow.

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