Eggplant Mozzarella Bake!

Alright, guys. This dish is delicious. And healthy and gluten free. Those are the only three positives about this dish.

Although it totally messes with my new minimalist cooking style (one pot, one pan, one plate) and used just about every dish that I own and then some, I’m going to post it anyway because 1) its super tasty, 2) its healthy and satisfying and 3) its still gluten free. So if you have a lot of time to kill and a dishwasher, I’d recommend giving it a shot!

Eggplant Mozzarella Bake

(like eggplant lasagna only without the gross ricotta)

Suggested Ingredients:

• 2 medium eggplants
• 1 onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 can of crushed tomatoes, 28 oz (or more! I’m a bad sauce budgeter so I struggled a bit with this amount.)
• 1 container fresh mozzarella, large balls (there should be four or so in the container).
• salt and pepper

Optional:

• fresh basil
• parmesan cheese

Instructions: 

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Prepare your onions, garlic and basil. Chop the onions thoroughly, mince the garlic and sliver the basil. Cut mozzarella balls into thin slices. 
3. Over medium heat, add 1 tbsp oil to a pan. Note: it might be useful for you to do this in a pot if you don’t have more than one large frying pan. Add onions and cook for five minutes. 
4. Add garlic and continue to cook for two minutes.
5. Pour in the entire can of tomatoes and stir. Add salt, pepper and basil. Continue to cook for 20 minutes.
6. While sauce is cooking, heat a large frying pan or griddle until smoking hot.
7. Slice your eggplant lengthwise (as pictured). The original recipe I used suggested coating the eggplant in oil and salting and peppering it, and I used a brush in order to do so. This is extremely messy and inconvenient. HOWEVER, my recommendation would be to take a baking pan and pour oil into that, then dip the eggplant in the pan on both sides. Salt and pepper while its sitting in the pan and then move immediately into the griddle. Don’t worry about the seeds–you won’t even notice them!
8. Cook eggplant until it becomes somewhat squishy and browned on bottom side. Flip and repeat. 
9. Remove sauce from heat and pour several ladelfuls on the bottom of a bakesafe pan. As eggplant cooks, layer eggplant along the bottom, side by side. 
10. Place mozzarella on top of the eggplant, then pour another layer of sauce to cover. Repeat until you run out of ingredients. 
11. Sprinkle parmesan cheese over the topmost layer of sauce and put into the oven. Bake until the cheese on top (and probably some mozzarella seeping through) browns slightly. Enjoy! 

Same idea, new direction!

Lovely people of the internet!

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, and I promise I have good reasons for that! Coming home from my year of studying abroad was incredibly difficult, and coming back to sub-par housing and a completely inefficient/terrible kitchen made cooking anything of value difficult. In addition, I’ve recently learned, through trial and error, that I’m moderately gluten intolerant, which has made it difficult for me to make a lot of the foods I’m better at cooking and, for the time being, has made baking a non-thing. I don’t know if any of you have tried gluten-free baking, but its basically the worst and most difficult science project ever. And, seeing as I’ve never been very good at complex scientific endeavors, I’ve found that learning how to do GF baking is basically impossible, and at the very least more hassle than it’s worth for the time being. I was just starting to get the hand of normal baking!

Trying to do GF baking has left me with a lot of questions.  What is Xanthan Gum and why is it so expensive? Why does my pumpkin bread taste like I’m licking a festive, autumnal-flavored ashtray? How much money am I going to have to spend before I actually create something edible? And for the time being, I’m going to go ahead and let those questions just sit unanswered because I live near a co-op that bakes/imports tons of tasty GF baked goods for me so that I don’t have to put myself through the torture of doing it myself.

Unfortunately, eating and gluten free is a task in its own right, and I’m only just starting to get the hang of it. Of course there are some awesome GF substitutes for “normal” foods, but they tend to be expensive and often aren’t especially good for you. So I’ve been experimenting with some recipes at school, trying to find out what works and what doesn’t. Lately I’ve been in a bit of a rut and have been eating a lot of soups and snacks and basically eating my entire weight in clementines on a weekly basis. But I know that I’m going to be facing a much more difficult/awesome problem soon: as some of you may  have read on my travel blog, I have a trip booked for this summer to Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and possibly Lao. Although I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to manage fairly well in Southeast Asia, where few foods contain gluten anyway (except pesky soy sauce!), I’m actually more worried about eating GF on the cheap in Australia and New Zealand.

Which brings me back to my main point– a new(ish) direction for the blog! I will be trying out some recipes that will translate well to cooking in hostels and use my blog to compile a list. I’m going to say in advance that the recipes might be a step down from the recipes I’ve posted to date; the whole goal is to make them manageable in situations in which I might only have one pot and one frying pan and one bowl, not to mention on a time crunch. Simple, cheap, healthy, wholesome gluten-free meals that can be made on the fly and don’t involve a lot of obscure, single-use ingredients.

So there you go! As time goes on I may try and modify some old recipes to make them GF, but as mentioned above with my pumpkin bread endeavor, this may be more difficult than I initially thought it would be. Hopefully I’ll be getting something up for you guys soon!

-Natalie