My Love/Hate Relationship with Eggplant

I love eggplant. No really, I LOVE it.  I love it fried, grilled, in pasta, however.  But until recently, I have only eaten eggplant when out at a restaurant because it is seriously such a pain to make at home. This summer I threw out TONS of organic eggplant, mostly because we were just trying to stay afloat with a newborn and a toddler and I didn't have the foresight to think about any meal that took more than 30 minutes to prepare,and ALL recipes involving eggplant take more than 30 minutes to prepare.  But since we decided to really commit ourselves to Meatless Monday, I am having to revisit my love/hate relationship with eggplant or else we're going to be eating pasta every Monday. Now, I have nothing against pasta.  That too, I love.  However, it really isn't healthy to eat like you're running the NYC Marathon the next day, when in fact: a) I have not run since probably 2005, and b) while mentally strenuous, my job as a teacher isn't physically demanding enough so as to require me to carboload.

Battle Eggplant:
As I drove home from school today, I knew what I had in store: eggplant that had to be peeled, seeded, salted, drained, grilled, then baked.  I also knew that the time was already 4:45, so dinner wasn't going to be until really late. For a second I felt like Julie from Julie & Julia when she would come home from work, debone a duck, and serve dinner at 11:30pm.  The only difference is Rachael Ray is decidedly NOT Julia Child, and stuffed eggplant is NOT beef bourguignon. I thought about just making the frozen pizzas, except that then the eggplant was going to go bad (no chance in hell Steve was going to make it in my absence), and the whole point of this experiment was to actually save money and if you throw away the groceries, then you definitely don't save money.

Long story short, I sucked it up, and made the Stuffed Eggplant Steaks. They were beyond good!  Steve loved them.  Will chose to eat carrot sticks and salad instead (weirdo, but whatever). They were kind of like a grilled eggplant parm with spinach. They are totally going into our rotation, except in the future I'll salt, drain and grill the eggplant on the weekend so that I only have to do the easy part (stuffing and baking them) on a weeknight. Another plus, in real life, they totally looked like the picture on the website:



That almost never happens! I think it took me about an hour start to finish, which really isn't that bad, but on a Monday an hour feels like an eternity!

I'm off from cooking tomorrow - be back Wednesday!