Salted Eggplant

New post at ANIMALS SPOTTED.

This is the first step to a delicious sweet eggplant dish without the acrid bitterness that can manifest. Cut the eggplant into slices about 3/4″ thick (or whatever you like, but this thickness works fairly well). Find a deep bowl with sides. Salt each side generously and stack the slices up in the bowl. I am not a big fan of salt, so was surprised that this did not make the dish overly salty. I guess it all comes out in the juice you see in the cup.

The picture just below was taken after about an hour and a half of soaking. About another half hour later, I squeezed each slice out like you would a washcloth, and about the same amount of “juice” came out. I didn’t take a picture of them at that point because they weren’t very attractive!

The next step is to quickly sauté the cubed eggplant with onions and mushrooms.

Next I just push the veggies aside and toss in the leftover spaghetti sauce from the day before and let it heat up.

When that sauce is almost heated through, shove it aside, too, and put the angel hair in to warm up. If, like this time, there isn’t enough pasta (or whatever) left over, just add some other starch, like the rice in this picture.

If things begin to look a bit dry, I wield my trusty spray bottle to keep the steam evenly distributed around the pan to warm things up appropriately.

The only new thing in this dish is the eggplant mixture. And it is VERY rich, so a nice green salad is a good accompaniment. Everything else is a leftover. One big pan does it all, so no big clean-up job at the end.

We had been tantalized by the delicious smells of this dinner, and we were really hungry, so I totally forgot to take a picture of the final product on our plates. Trust me – it was dee-licioso! ;->

And, yes, there was a bit leftover – enough for a skimpy lunch for each of us. But we can supplement with a big plate of avocado and red peppers.

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