Hello procrastinators, today we’re making something new in celebration of a very special time for procrastination: midterms. The time when you really have work to do is the best time to teach yourself a new meal – unfortunately this is not mathNEWS and we don’t have fancy emoji typefonts so you just have to imagine the little purple eggplant emojis right now ~~
As I had never previously made this dish, I did have to do some research. After purchasing Parmesan and a singular eggplant and thinking “Wow, what a lot of eggplant” I just assumed I was good to go. I soon found out how wrong I was because in fact not only do eggplant parmesans not require Parmesan, they also require quite a lot of eggplant. As in more than one. After googling around for a while I figured that my best bet was just to go with the ingredients I did have and combine as many versions as I could to make something that would hopefully taste good and be nutritious, unlike all of the KD I normally consume.
Ingredients
So the ingredients I used are not the ingredients I recommend you use. I will put my ingredients in brackets if you’re curious, but just as with my midterms, I was not prepared to cook this meal. (On a side note, cooking midterms is a bad idea no matter how prepared you are.)
2-3 eggplants, mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, plain tomato sauce, salt, pepper, olive oil, oregano
(1 eggplant, frozen squash, cheddar cheese, Parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, dried basil, roasted red pepper pasta sauce)
Step one: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and then wash the frying pan on top of the stove that your roommate never washed but which you will need later.
Step two: Chop up the eggplant. If you have roommates who do their dishes this may be when you choose to put the eggplant in a colander and salt it to tenderize it for half an hour. If, like me, you are disgusted by the caked-on pasta that’s been slowly accumulating on the colander since the start of the term because your roommates won’t buy new sponges and don’t wash things until after the pasta has dried onto the metal, you may choose to skip this step. In which case it’s time to move on to frying!
Step three: Now that you’ve done the dirty work and cleaned someone else’s dishes so that you can make dinner, heat the frying pan on medium heat. When you think it’s pretty hot, cover the bottom in oil and heat a bit longer. Place your slices of eggplant into the oil and fry away. The point of this is to tenderize the eggplant and you want it to be a nice golden colour on each side. Prepare a cookie sheet with a piece of paper towel to absorb some of the oil and when each piece is nicely golden lay it on the sheet.
Step four: Layering the eggplant! I forgot to ask my friend to lend me her nice glass cooking dish so I had to search my kitchen for an equivalent dish to bake my eggplant in. I tried under the stove and found a very unpleasant assortment of unclean dishes. One of which I thought might suit my purposes so I cleaned it (thoroughly) and went on with my frying. Unfortunately when I had finished frying, I realized to my dismay that the dish would not be large enough. Another search of the kitchen produced one of those aluminum dishes that hockey dads use at team BBQs to hold the burgers, it was far too big but better than too small. First you want to put down a layer of eggplant, then mozzarella chunks, then oregano then cover with sauce and layer again till the last layer. Don’t put oregano on this one. I was trying to make up for my lack of eggplant so I tried putting squash in amongst the eggplant and it tasted decent. I don’t, however, recommend substituting cheddar cheese for mozzarella, just take the time to go buy some mozza; you’re trying to procrastinate anyways.
Stick the concoction in the oven, wait half an hour, take ‘er out, sprinkle with fresh basil leaves (‘cause you’re worth it) and enjoy! Preferably with a glass of wine because good on you for doing all those dishes, that’s hard work.
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