Moore food please!: eggplant

Monday, March 8, 2010

Baked Penne with Sausage

Tonight was comfort food night at the Moore house. We got the Williams-Sonoma Comfort Food cookbook from work (working in a library has its advantages) and it is just stunningly beautiful. Most of the dishes are not even remotely vegetarian friendly and a lot of them would be difficult to impossible to create meatless versions. We did decide to try the baked ziti with sausage recipe with vegetarian sausage. The sausage was okay, but in the future we will use faux sausage crumbles rather than links. We also switched out the ziti with penne because we found a whole grain penne.

Baked spaghetti has been a staple in our house, so we decided to try another approach with it. And this recipe did have some additions that we will reuse in the future, namely red pepper flake in the sauce. We both agree that most anything can be made tastier with red pepper flake. Also the addition of roasted eggplant was much needed.

We give this one 4 out of 5 stars. The added plus is that we have plenty of left overs for lunches this week. Oh good God, I just said that. My life is sad sometimes.

Stay away from the Tofurky Italian Sausage (the dish was good despite this part)

sauce with roasted eggplant and sausage

pre-bake

more pictures here

Monday, February 1, 2010

Gratin of Eggplant with Plum Tomatoes, Fresh Mozzarella and Lemon-Basil Pesto

Oh, fresh mozzarella how I love thee. Laura and I broke out the Cooking for Two: Perfect Meals for Pairs that was a gift from my friend Shawn and his wife (also my cousin) Jill . We like the book, but it does tend to lend itself to more expensive meals than we usually like to make. We found a pretty good deal on the fresh mozzarella and it was oh so tasty, but it isn't something we will splurge on that often.

Tonight's dish is from page 46, Gratin of Eggplant Layered with Plum Tomatoes, Fresh Mozzarella, and Lemon-Basil Pesto. Yes that is a mouthful, but an oh so tasty mouthful. The pesto was simple: blended pine nuts (that had been roasted in the oven), garlic, Parmesan cheese, fresh basil and lemon juice. The eggplant was browned in a large pan with olive oil and then the yummy layers began.

The pesto brought a bright flavor to the dish that I very much enjoyed. I used too much olive oil in the browning of the eggplant which resulted in far too much liquid coming out in the baking process. Next time we make this we will use less oil on the eggplant and slice it a bit thicker. The mozzarella could have been a bit thinner but that was tricky stuff to slice. Laura thought the cheese could of used a bit more time in the oven, but we both loooooved the fresh mozzarella anyway. We give this one 3.5 of 5 stars.