Aubergine Parmigiana

From River Cottage Veg Everyday!, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Bloomsbury, 2011.

This book is strongly promoting a meat-free diet and the author presents his reasons at the beginning of each section. These sections are easy to read and the light, informal writing is easily accessed, and tends to go someway towards convincing. The first section is concerned with comfort food and the first recipe is certainly comfort food and bursting with flavour.

Nearly every vegetarian cookbook has a recipe for an eggplant parmigiana and they are usually all very tasty. I like to try each new one to see how they compare.

The eggplants were sliced, sprinkled with salt and left to drain in a colander.

The next step in the recipe was to make a tomato sauce. It was almost identical with one I had made from a Jamie Oliver recipe and since I had some left I decided to use this.

The aubergine slices were then fried until tender. It took a little while to get them all done. A layer of them was placed in a casserole. This was covered with some of the tomato sauce. Over this went some mozzarella pieces. It was supposed to be buffalo mozzarella but my wallet was a bit short this week so it had to be the cheaper variety. Then some grated parmesan was sprinkled over this.  The layers were repeated until all the ingredients were used up and I had ended with a cheese layer. The oven did the rest of the job.

This is such an enjoyable dish. The flavours burst right out and the chewy cheese strands are fun to eat. The author classes it as comfort food and it fits that category extremely well. A recipe to go back to.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔