What We’re Cooking Sundays…Who You Calling Eggplant?

We’re back. It’s the last weekend in January and we’re seriously wondering what made this month zoom by like it was running from the law. Not that we’re judging if it is running, we’re just kinda saying it’s interesting ’tis all.

A starts school tomorrow. Winter semester, junior year. This whole ‘watching your kid grow up thing’ is pretty amazing. It feels like it was just 21 years ago that she was sleeping through the night for the first time. Now she’s almost always sleeping through the day. I kid. I kid.

We debated what to cook this week and I can’t really be sure how we came up with eggplant parmigiano, but that’s what happened in our kitchen tonight. And it was easy. And it was delicious. And there are leftovers if you are interested and live, like next door.

First, neither of us is eating chicken lately so we knew chicken was out. I don’t like veal so we didn’t need to worry about looking at the meat section at all. When I asked A if she wanted to do eggplant she said “heck yes” and proceeded to send me off to H-Mart. Let me tell you that for about $20, we made a feast tonight. And I’m pretty sure some of the money was spent on chocolate frosting so this is really a deal. Seriously.

Since I’ve never made this dish before I needed a recipe and found a fantastic one over at Cooking Light. I wanted to offset all of the cheese I planned to use by using panko breadcrumbs instead of the real thing. However, I went with full fat ricotta because the half-fat stuff isn’t so amazingly low in fat and calories that I felt it really important to go with the lite stuff, but don’t let me talk you out of it if you like it better. We also used a mixture of low fat and regular mozzarella just because that’s what we had in the house.

To give ourselves a few more veggie points, we chopped up about a cup of kale and added it to the ricotta-egg-parmigiano-basil mixture and we cheated, but just a little, by using a traditional pasta sauce from Barilla. I wonder if they would like to send me a case of their good stuff so we can make more “What We’re Cooking Sundays” happen. Hint. Hint.

This is the recipe we used and besides adding the kale, I threw in a few more red pepper flakes and decided to grill one batch of the eggplant before coating with egg and breading – or panko’ing them – and I’m pretty sure that next time we make this I’ll just grill all of the eggplant.

While dinner was cooking I listened to (okay, it was on constant rotation) my original copy of

Rumors. There’s something to be said about cooking while listening to records – it reminds me of growing up. Sometimes my mom would leave me alone long enough so I could dance around the room while she cooked, sometimes I danced and cooked – mostly I danced. Tonight I let Stevie sing what I’m thinking because it’s true that sometimes players really only love you when their playing and all that kind of stuff that swirls around in my head while I’m measuring and mixing.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how much time it takes to learn to run with an injury. It feels like a lot of my effort goes to remembering to either run more slowly or not overcompensating for the fact that everything hurts differently than in the old days – BB. That’s before back. Tomorrow night A and I are heading to the gym. She prefers the treadmill and I just don’t want to slip and break anything on any of the hills in my neighborhood. To be honest, winter can’t end quick enough for me. I’m running with my old stand-bys – a pair of white Brooks GTS 9s. Sometimes I think I want to try out something with a lighter weight and a brighter color then I always end up back with the old faves because I know they can go the distance. To offset their plain white look I added hot pink laces. That’ll teach them.

And that brings me to the thing I really wanted to talk about. French Lessons.

I’ve been working on my hobbies, which is an odd way to phrase it but it’s late and I couldn’t think of another verb to describe what I’m doing. Whenever I tell people how much I’ve loved my trips to Paris and how much I look forward to being ‘home’ each year they ask if I speak French. The answer, of course, is no. That hasn’t stopped me from having the most magical times and I’m grateful to everyone who has taken an extra moment to let me fumble around with my guidebooks. One of the most enchanting things about the French language is the ability to express so many versions of the word ‘love’ and in some ways, I am sure that’s what makes me love the language and the country so much. Love, for all that it seems to escape me sometimes, is the most wonderfully transformative feeling and to have the understanding that no one word can ever fully embrace all that love feels so important.

In my daily practice I look for ways to figure out yet another version of ‘love’ and sometimes I succeed – but mostly I’m learning my numbers and colors. No worries, I love numbers and colors.

So I leave you with the following – use wisely but often:

Je t’aime de tout mon coeur (zhuh tem duh too mohn cuhr): I love you with all my heart

Je t’aime à fond (zhuh tem ah fohnd) : I love you through and through

Je t’aime pour toujours (zhuh tem poor too-joor) : I love you forever

Je t’aime plus qu’hier et moins que demain (zhuh tem ploo kee-air ay mwahn kuh duh-mahn) : I love you more than I did yesterday and less than I will tomorrow

That last one is my favorite and currently in the running for my next tattoo.

Happy Sunday. Next week we’re going to head down to Chinatown so expect something that looks and acts like a dumpling to make its way to our weekly menu.

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