Healthy Eating: Eggplant Parmigiana

My husband loves eggplants!  He can eat eggplants the whole day - fried, roasted, boiled, in a salad, what-have-you!  I thought of making eggplant parmigiana for him one weekend instead of our usual pasta snack (lasagna, baked mac, spaghetti).

This recipe is from Panlasang Pinoy.  The steps are very easy and the ingredients are readily available.  I didn't use the marinara sauce from this site though.  I used Giada de Laurentiis' Marinara sauce recipe from the Food Network.

You should try this one weekend.  It's a good side dish for lunch or you can get one serving for a snack.  I made baked salmon as the main dish for lunch with this as our side.  Nice combination!

Prepare the marinara sauce first.

Marinara Sauce
Recipe by Giada de Laurentiis from Food Network

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
• 1 celery stalk, finely chopped (didn't have this available)
• 1 carrots, peeled and finely chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt (I used ordinary iodized salt)
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 (32-ounce) cans crushed tomatoes
• 1 dried bay leaves (didn't have this available

Heat olive oil in a pan.  Saute onions, garlic, carrots and season with salt and pepper.  Add the tomatoes and simmer for 1 hour.

Eggplant Parmigiana
Recipe from Panlasang Pinoy

• 2 pieces eggplants (the recipe used huge eggplants {check the tutorial video in the site}so I used 4 pieces of eggplants)
• 2 pieces raw eggs
• 1/2 cup bread crumbs (I used Japanese breadcrumbs)
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 6 ounces mozarella cheese, shredded
• 2 1/2 cups marinara sauce (see recipe above from Giada de Laurentiis)
• 1/2 cup parmesan and romano cheese, grated (I used parmesan only)
• 1/2 teaspoon dried parsley flakes (didn't have parsley flakes so I skipped this)

Peel and slice the eggplants.

Lightly beat eggs in a bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the bread crumbs, garlic powder, salt and black pepper.

Dip the eggplants into the eggs and roll in the bread crumb mixture.


Heat the olive oil in the pan and fry the eggplants until their golden brown. 

Place the fried eggplants in a plate covered in paper towels to absorb the extra oil.

Preheat your oven to 350F.

In an oven dish, pour 1/3 of the marinara sauce.

Arrange a layer of eggplants on top of the marinara. 

 

Pour some of the marinara sauce on top then sprinkle with parmesan.  Repeat this for 2 or 3 layers.

On the topmost layer, spread the shredded mozarella cheese.

Bake for 18-22 minutes.  Cool for 10 minutes and serve!

Pawis rating: 3 of 5 easy but I found that frying is time-consuming :-(