After a brief hiatus… WE’RE BACK!
My apartment lay out is such that each smell created within it permeates every corner of every room, eventually settling in the front entrance way. This feature is terrible for bathroom smells and somehow worse for kitchen smells. The smells of once delicate masterpieces become mangled as they waft through the many turns of the only hallway connecting the apartment. As they sit in the front room, they become stale, aging but not disappearing, until the next kitchen smell takes over.
This setup is especially detrimental when the kitchen gets smoky. The smoke flows out of the kitchen, down the hallway past the bathroom, and eventually gets stuck between the two bedrooms, unable to completely make the turn into the living room. Our fire alarm is right there. While I used to think this thing only went off at night when I was trying to sleep but my roommate decided it was a great time to cook a steak, I was proven wrong while making the Eggplant Parmesan recipe from the Salem County Cookbook.
After I cut the eggplants into discs, salted them, and patted them dry with paper towels (a tip I picked up from Binging With Babish), I fired up my cast iron with oil and started frying. While frying the unbreaded eggplant, I started with about a half-inch of sunflower oil on the bottom of the pan, hoping for a golden shallow fry. But, I was rushing.
I committed to making this dish for a friend dinner at Gary’s place. I had all day to make it, but wanted the dish to come out of the oven as close to dinner time as possible for optimal tastiness. When I began cooking, I theoretically had enough time to prep, fry, and bake everything with half an hour to spare for transportation to Gary’s house and cooling. That was before my fight with the fire alarm.
While I was worrying about the eggplant discs frying with enough time for baking before I had to leave, I wasn’t paying attention to the oil level in the pan reducing with every new fry nor the smoke filling the air. After about five discs, the fire alarm started screaming from the hallway. I abandoned my post at the oven to wave my dish rag at the alarm while yelling back, “C’mon! Shut up!” The fire alarm stopped its fit. I sprinted back to the stove to find none of the discs burned. I took each from the pan and replaced them with new slices. Then, the fire alarm screamed again. This dance continued for the next fifteen minutes, only pausing for the brief seconds between successfully swatting smoke away from the alarm and my sprint back to the stove top. It did cross my mind to add more oil, but I was running low and trying to conserve enough to finish this dish.
Despite all that, the eggplant turned out great. Each piece was golden brown, layered in the casserole dish between ladles of tomato sauce, and ready for the oven with 25 minutes to spare. While the eggplant baked, I managed to take a shower, dry off, get dressed, put on makeup, pack by backpack, and zip up my jacket just as the timer on the oven went off. Scarf, hat, and mittens on, I pulled the dish out of the oven, covered it in tin foil, and walked straight to Gary’s.
Though my gag reflex isn’t convinced, I am a huge fan of eggplant. It easily takes on a smoky flavor, breaks down into an almost-sauce-like consistency with minimal effort (making a dish creamy i.e. baba ganoush), and is generally easy to work with. Despite how delicious it is, something about a stringy dollop of eggplant on the end of my spoon causes the top of my throat to begin to close. Its like it’s saying, “There is no possible way we are putting that snot ball in our mouths. It's obviously poisonous.”
As you can tell, my photography skills were lacking for this post. That’s what I get for not asking Gary to be my photographer!
That being said, nothing about this dish made me want to puke. Because of the salting, drying, and frying of the eggplant, the eggplant didn’t have much of a chance of getting stringy. Instead, once fried and baked, it simply became soft, easily sliceable, and delicious - similar to cooked tomatoes!
The final dish could've been mistaken simply for pasta sauce or maybe even lasagna. All of the ingredients blended together in the oven to make a creamy, slightly sweet bite. Thought it was delicious, I think in the future I would prefer a breaded version. Or, I need to crisp up the eggplant more before baking it. I think the only missing feature was diversity in mouth feel and a little green garnish.