spaghetti squash with roasted fennel

Ed was gone the other day, so I cooked myself a spaghetti squash.  He claims not to like them; I think they're amazing.  The taste is pretty bland, but it's a squash, that turns into spaghetti!!  How can you not be amazed by that??  Anyway, I figured I'd use it like spaghetti, and roasted up some fennel while the squash was cooking, and tossed all that with a sage-y butter sauce, and it was delicious.



To cook the spaghetti squash, cut the squash in half lengthwise.  Scoop out the seeds (these are good when roasted, too), and cook the squash, cut side down, on a greased pan for about 30min at 400F.  Once you can poke it with a fork and there's no real resistance, it's done.  Let it cool enough to handle, then use a fork to scrape the insides out.  They'll come out in strands, like spaghetti.  So amazing!

The fennel I just tossed with some olive oil and kosher salt, and roasted on a metal pan for 20min or so at 400F.  It browns up nicely on the bottom.

The sauce was simple - I melted a tablespoon (or two, for two people) of butter in a small pan, and dropped in some coarsely chopped sage leaves.  Once they crisped up a bit, and the butter was slightly darker, I poured that over the squash and tossed it around.

And then top the whole thing with parmesan cheese, because that makes it even more delicious.

Beet ravioli

This is an old one, but we made some beet ravioli the other day.  It was quite tasty, and also, it was pink.  I don't entirely remember the recipe, because this was a while ago.  But I believe it was 1C pureed beets, two egg yolks, and enough flour to turn that into a dough (a few cups?).  The filling was something with ricotta - probably a cup of ricotta, some cooked mushrooms, and some herbs and spices.  Hard to go wrong with that filling!

First, you roll out your pasta dough, using plenty of flour.  You don't want it to stick.  Then you put down lumps of filling, in orderly grid fashion.  Then put the other sheet of pasta dough on top, and cut out your ravioli.  

I crimped the edges with a fork, to make sure they're stay closed.  

Cook the ravioli ~1-2min, in a very large pot of water, just until they float to the surface of the water.  The ravioli above were just served with olive oil, salt, and parmesan cheese, but any sort of creamy or smooth sauce would work with these guys.  They don't taste like beets at all, but they were pink!  woohoo!  

Pumpkin gnocchi

These were actual pumpkin, as opposed to butternut squash, which I just find easier to work with.  Ed wandered in to the kitchen as I was puréeing the pumpkin, and noted that there was a giant bowl full of orange goo - yes, that is how pumpkin gnocchi are made!  We ate these in a browned butter sage sauce, with some caramelized onions and little sopressata bits, and they were delicious.  A+ on the Ed-rating, too.  You could probably do some other sauce; a creamy something or other would be tasty, for sure, but this one worked very nicely.

Pumpkin Gnocchi

Made enough for two

1C pumpkin puree (I used homemade puree, I imagine stuff out of a can would be a bit denser)

1.5C flour

2 egg yolks

~1/2tsp kosher salt

Mix the pumpkin and egg yolks and salt.  Add the flour, until you have a dough that you can roll out.  Divide it into 2-4 balls, and roll into ropes, on a very well-floured surface.  You want your dough to still be really loose.  I found I more sort of stretched and pinched the dough, rather than rolled it.  Cut the ropes into chunks, and sprinkle with more flour.  You want these guys well-enough floured that they don't stick to each other when you drop them in the water.

Get a big pot of water boiling.  The bigger the pot, the less likely the gnocchi are to stick to each other in the water.  

Sage brown butter sauce

1 onion, diced

some sopressata, or bacon, diced

1 bunch of sage, chopped coarsely

2-3 tbs butter

Put the sopressata in a pan.  Once it's leaked out enough grease, add the onions.  Cook those together until the onions are mostly caramelized and the sopressata is crispy.  Remove from pan.

Melt butter in pan.  Once it's barely started to brown, add the sage.  Cook until the sage is crispy and the butter is browned.  Add to the onions and sopressata.

Cook the gnocchi for ~2-3 minutes.  They're done when they float to the top of the water.  You may have to cook them in batches.  

Put gnocchi on a plate, pour on sauce, toss to combine, and serve.  Parmesan cheese optional, but delicious!

Cheesy broccoli

This is a pretty delicious way to eat broccoli.  Basically, it's roasted broccoli with cheese on top.  Hard to go wrong.  

Cut broccoli into bite-size pieces.  Toss with some olive oil, put on a baking sheet, sprinkle with coarse salt, and roast at 400F for ~15min.  Once you can stick a fork through the thick bits (and the bottoms are nice and browned, slice some cheddar, place on top of the broccoli, and cook until it's melted.  Enjoy immediately!

Pumpkin-cranberry scones

Actually, I lied - these are butternut squash scones, not pumpkin.  But, it basically tastes the same to me, and both are yellow and squashy, and I happened to have butternut squash, so I used it.  These scones were pretty fantastic.  I ate the entire batch for lunch.  *burp*

Butternut Squash Cranberry scones

Made eight

1-1/3C flour

2 tbs brown sugar

1 tbs baking powder (that was too much.  I'd recommend 2 tsp)

1/4tsp fine salt

1/2 stick butter, frozen

1/3C pumpkin

1 egg

1 tbs pumpkin-y spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, allspice)

~1/2C cranberries, cut in half

Icing:

some powdered sugar, in a bowl

some more pumpkin-y spices

enough water to make it a paste

put flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a bowl.  Stir those together, make sure lumps are out.  

Use a cheese grater (with big holes) and grate frozen butter into the flour.  then use your fingertips to rub the butter into the flour, just pinch, for exactly 37.2 seconds.  

in a different bowl, mix egg and pumpkin.

dump wet into dry.  fold to combine, don't overmix.  It can still be very crumbly.  you don't want the butter to heat up, since that's what creates flakes.

Dump onto a floured surface.  Push all the crumbles into one lump, flatten out a little, fold in half, flatten a little, fold in half.  form into a circle.  cut into wedges with a knife.

bake at 350 for 25min.

make the icing.  when the scones come out of the oven, flip them upside down into the icing, move them around a bit to spread the icing, then flip back over and put on a plate to cool.

Flaky!  And delicious.

Cinnamon french toast

Weekends should start with that photo.  Preferably in bed.  This was some tasty french toast, covered in c-grade maple syrup - delicious and dark and maple-y.  Yup, that got a good Ed-rating.

I'm not sure if this is the legit way to make french toast, but it worked for us.  Mix up an egg and some milk, maybe a quarter cup of milk?  Cut the bread into slices, and dunk both sides in the egg mixture.  Let it sit there as you melt some butter in the pan.  Once the butter is melted and pan is hot, sprinkle cinnamon on both sides of the bread, and cook for ~4-5min a side.  Once cooked, slather in maple syrup and devour.

Cauliflower mac n cheese

I'd really been wanting some mac and cheese lately, and I wanted it with cauliflower in it.  Becky had been talking about some omelet she had that was cauliflower and chard (granted, she wasn't talking about it in a good way), but it made me think that this would be a good combo when slathered in cheesy cream sauce and mixed with pasta and baked.  How could that not make you drool?  This was a bit of a free-form recipe, but it worked well, I thought.  I'll totally make it again.  The Ed-rating was so-so, unfortunately.  He didn't like the chard, said he would have preferred it on the side.  But he liked the cauliflower.  Can't win 'em all, at least I was super happy!

Cauliflower mac

Made ~6-8 servings

1 head of cauliflower

1 bunch of swiss chard

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1 bunch of sage

1 box of pasta

~1/4lb cheese, of a melty variety (I used a mix of cheddar and jarlesburg)

1 tbs butter

1 tbs flour

~2C milk

Salt and pepper, to taste

Bread crumbs, for the top

My goal here was to minimize the number of dishes that I used, and minimize time.  I am a hungry woman!  Feed me cheesy pasta!

Get a big pot of water boiling.  Preheat your oven to 450F.

Dice the onion, and begin to sweat it.  Dice the garlic.

Meanwhile, remove the chard from its stems.  Dice the stems and chop the chard.  Once the onions are sweated,  add the garlic, and once that is toasted, throw the chard stems into the frying pan.  Add some kosher salt.  Once those are tender enough to be tasty, add the leaves.  You just want to wilt the leaves.

Cut the cauliflower into large florets.  Once the water boils, add them to the water.  After a few minutes (5?), test it with a fork.  If it's done, pull it out with a slotted spoon.  Put in a big bowl.  Put the pasta in the water.  You want to cook it to just a little less than al dente.

If the chard is done, add it to the big bowl.  Grate the cheeses.  More cheese is best.  If in doubt, add more cheese.

Puree half the cauliflower in a blender or food processor.  Once your frying pan is free, melt the butter, then whisk in the flour.  Once it's combined nicely, add the milk, still whisking.  Then add the cheese, and salt the sauce to taste.  I added ~1tsp kosher salt, I think.  Add the pureed cauliflower to the sauce.  Pour into the big bowl.  Once the pasta is done, reserve some of the cooking water in case the sauce is too thick, then drain the pasta and add it to the big bowl.  Mix everything together.

Transfer to baking dish.

Put some breadcrumbs and more cheese on top, and bake for ~20min, until the top is golden brown, and the insides are bubbling.  Devour!

Plum kale salad

I'd been seeing this salad on a bunch of food blogs, and figured, hey, I have some ricotta right now, I have to try this.  Everyone else was raving about it, but it wasn't amazing.  I mean, it looked pretty, and the flavor was nice, but I had issues trying to figure out how to eat it.  The plum slices were too big, and the crispy kale bits turned un-crispy in the dressing, and the best part was definitely the rendered sopressata I'd put on top, which doesn't turn up in the original recipe.

This didn't get an Ed-rating, since I'd made it for lunch, but I doubt he would have liked the layer of ricotta on the bottom.  I'm not sure how I would have improved on this salad - I mean, the combination of flavors really was tasty.  Maybe smaller cubes of plum, and smaller pieces of crispy kale, and the ricotta mixed into it all, would make it easier to eat.  Definitely keep the sopressata.  Or bacon.  Cured pork product improves on any sweet + salty combination!  

Not sure I'll make it again, but I will remember that the plums complimented the savory kale nicely.  And the balsamic vinaigrette was good, too, I liked it mixed with the ricotta.  

Fish tacos

Still catching up on backlog - these fish tacos were from when I was in Sunderland last month.  Peter still thinks they're "weird", but eats them anyway, with noises of contentment, so no complaints there.  This was bluefish, and worked pretty well as a filler for the tacos.  

I seasoned the bluefish with some chili powder, salt, and pepper, and let it sit there while I cooked down some diced red onion.  Once the onion was pretty well caramelized, in went some garlic, and then the fish, with a healthy squeeze of lemon.  I also threw in some halved cherry tomatoes, which, while not adding a whole lot to the flavor, made it look nicer.  

Also featured in the tacos is some garlic-lemon spinach.  Definitely one of my favorite ways to eat spinach, though I'm not sure it added anything to the taco.  And of course, avocado, because avocados are awesome.

The tacos were just the recipe on the back of the masa bag.  I think it's 1C masa flour to 2/3C water.  I rolled them out on some plastic wrap, and that made them a lot easier to transport to the pan for a brief minute of cooking.  I suppose a tortilla press might make round tortillas, but whatevs, these still taste good.

Peter mentioned that I couldn't post a photo on the blog without making a silly face while eating - of course!  Silly face accomplished!

Angel food cake and a cardamom-lime fruit salad

Ed wanted angel food cake for his birthday cake.  This is slightly more troublesome than a chocolate cake or something, but I figured it was totally within my capabilities, aside from the whole I-don't-have-a-springform-pan deal.  I figured I would make little mini ramekins of cake, because those would be small enough that the cake couldn't collapse.  This worked.

I followed this recipe, except I cut it in half.  I also used less sugar... it was easier to just use 3/4C than to add in the extra 2 tbs.

If you follow all the steps in that recipe I linked to, you will have a successful angel food cake.  The one thing I did change is that I buttered and sugared the bottom of the ramekins (but not the sides!), so that it would be easier to remove the cakes once they were cooked.

I also put the extra batter into the heart-shaped pan.  This mostly worked, though the middle of the cake was a little deflated after it cooled.  Still tasted delicious, though.

The topping was a fruit salad in a cardamom lime sauce.  I put the juice of a lime, a tablespoon or so of sugar, and the seeds from a cardamom pod into a saucepan, and boiled that, while stirring, for ~5min.  This made it all thick and syrupy.  It was delicious.  Then I poured the syrup over a small fruit salad of a kiwi, ~4 strawberries, and half a starfruit.  That sat that marinating while we ate dinner, and the strawberries turned the syrup all pink.  Once we were ready for dessert, I dumped the fruit on top of some whipped cream on top of the angel food cake, and poured more syrup on top.  Delicious!  I could have eaten that all day long.  

Lobster risotto

It was Ed's birthday last week.  So, I made him a 5-course dinner, and paired as many of the courses as I could with tasty beer.  We started with gougères, and a sliced pear and some chimay.  Can't say no to appetizers like that!  

(I kinda forgot that these guys puff in the oven, so they ended up being pretty huge, rather than tiny little delicate bite-sized morsels.  Oh well, still tasted awesome).

They went poof!  and were cheesy.  These things are so awesome.  Click that link and make some.

Then we had the salad course, which was caramelized pears, toasted walnuts, avocado, arugula, and craisins, in a maple mustard dressing.  That was pretty delicious, too.

The main course, which I served with a Belgian white beer from Unibroue, was a lobster risotto.  Lobster has been wicked cheap around here lately, and it's always delicious, so I decided to try my hand at a lobster risotto.  This was a bit time-consuming, but well worth the effort.  

First, I cooked the lobster.  It was a little guy, just 1.16lb, and I boiled him for 8 minutes.  Once he was cool enough to handle, I pulled the meat out of the shell, and threw the shell back into a pot, with some onions and carrots and bay leaves and the rinds from the gruyère cheese that I'd used up in the gougères, to make a stock.

Once I had a stock, I just set that aside until it was time to make the risotto.

To make the risotto, I started with a diced onion.  In a big wok, I sweated the onion in some olive oil, then added a few cloves of garlic, diced up.  Once that was toasted, in went ~1C of arborio rice.  I turned the heat up to high and kept that moving around for ~1-2min, until it was also toasted, and starting to look translucent.  While all this was happening, I had a pot with half a bottle of cheap white wine (pinot grigio; not ideal, but it was what was on sale) and a pot of the lobster stock warming on the back burners.  Once the rice was toasted, I added the wine, ~1/2C at a time.  I'd add some wine, stir it around until the liquid was gone, add some more.  When the wine was gone, I started in on the lobster stock.

About 10 minutes into the whole process, I threw in the chopped chanterelle mushrooms, and a pinch or two of kosher salt.  Continue to stir over medium-high heat, adding liquid as necessary, until the rice is cooked, another 15 minutes or so.  Then I added in the chopped lobster meat, and some parsley for garnish.

We served the risotto with some roasted brussels sprouts, just tossed in olive oil and kosher salt and roasted at 400F for 15min, because green things are good for you, and, incidentally, delicious.

The risotto was utterly amazing, and delicious.  It always is delicious, but the lobster flavor made it even more delicious.  It may be worth making this again before the lobster season ends.

Dessert was angel food cake topped with fruit in a cardamom lime syrup, but I'll save that for another post.  We also had a cheese board.  And Allagash Interlude, for the final dessert beer.

The cheeses were gruyere, a soft robiola cow/sheep milk mix, some sort of goat cheese round that I've forgotten the name of, and a very mild blue, that I've also forgotten the name of... it was a very delicious blue, though, and similar to a saint agur.

Beet burgers

I'm a bit behind on blogging some of the delicious things we've been eating lately, so here goes a stab at some posting.  These are beet burgers.  They were actually quite delicious, but got a mediocre Ed-rating, I think mostly because they're sorta weird.  They're kinda like a veggie burger.  I thought they were the perfect mix of crunchy and chewy and delicious.  The inspiration was from an Ottolenghi http://www.ottolenghi.co.uk/blog/2010/10/17/cake-geeks/">

recipe, but I ended up not really following that at all.  

I believe the ratio was:
2 eggs
1 raw beet, peeled and grated
1/2C bulgur, cooked
~1/2C random assorted fresh herbs (basil, dill, and parsley, here)
2tsp kosher salt
Some pepper
1/4 preserved lemon, diced
some fresh ginger, diced
1 clove garlic, diced
Some tahini - 2 tbs?

Mix everything up, then shallow-fry the patties until they're crispy and brown on each side.  It took ~5min a side, I think.

Drain on a paper towel, and salt lightly while they're still warm.

I topped mine with a yogurt-cucumber sauce.  It was a nice addition.

Very pink inside!

I liked how crunchy these were on the outside.  And they tasted deliciously like beets and herbs.  I'd make them again, for sure.  Maybe served with something, as opposed to just on their own...

Tomato tart season!

I've got this cookbook, that I love, from Ottolenghi, the pastry/catering shop around the corner from my grandfather's place in London.  I haven't cooked my way through it yet, but I'm slowly attempting to.  Anyway, in a nod to my easily distractible nature, I discovered that Yotam Ottolenghi has a blog, on the guardian.co.uk website, and I copied down a bunch of links to recipes I wanted to try.  I want to try them all!!  Unfortunately, though his food is delicious, his recipe-writing occasionally leaves something to be desired, and if you blindly follow the recipe and don't use your brain, you end up with a flop.  

This happened to me recently, with his tomato and almond tart.  In theory, this should have been amazing.  All the pieces are things I love to eat - fresh tomatoes, puff pastry, almond frangipane - but it didn't work that well all together.  This is as much my fault, since I should have noticed that all the stuff on top of the puff pastry was going to weigh it down too much to puff.  Alas and alack, I didn't notice, and this rich tart wasn't everything it could be.  Don't worry, though!  I'm not just reviewing a bad recipe, I'm posting a tomato tart recipe that totally worked, and is awesome, after the flop!  

The Ottolenghi tart promised to be a most luscious layer of rich, nutty sweetness, after the almond paste soaked up the juice of the tomatoes.  cool, that sounds tasty.  I suppose an option would be to make 1/4 of the amount of almond stuff called for, so it's thinner on the puff pastry, and to slice the tomatoes way, way, waaaay thinner.  Here's the link to the recipe:

link

The end result, unfortunately, revolved around the fact that there was too much stuff on the puff pastry.  It took 40 minutes to cook, rather than 25, and even then wasn't fully puffed.  It was also way too buttery - the whole thing just oozed out grease, constantly.  I find that kind of gross.  The overall tart was just very heavy tasting, and not a great use of puff pastry.  A pie dough would have stood up better to that sort of abuse.

With that in mind, I'd say my next tomato tart was a ringing success!  It didn't get a great Ed-rating, because he didn't try it when it was fresh, and the tomato juices had soaked into the pie crust of the leftover piece and made it all soggy, but it also didn't get a bad Ed-rating.  I liked this tart because I thought the ricotta filling did a nice job making the whole thing taste a little heartier and goopier, more like a pizza really.  Because pizza is awesome.  I recommend making this version, especially if your garden is still overflowing with tomatoes.  It's been a great way to use up our landlords' tomatoes… 

Alex's vastly improved tomato tart

1 shell of pie crust, pre-baked

2-3 *good* tomatoes (not the mealy supermarket kind.  this tart relies on good tomatoes), sliced to <1 p="p" thick="thick">

~1/2C caramelized onions

~1/2C ricotta cheese

~1/2C chopped basil

1 egg

salt and pepper, to taste

~1/4C grated hard cheese (pecorino or parmesan)

1 can of anchovies, optional

If you haven't got caramelized onions hanging about, cut an onion in half from end to end, and then slice off some half-rings from that, so you end up with long pieces.  Pan fry those for 20-30min on medium-low in some olive oil, until they're just beyond golden brown, but not yet burned.  They should taste sweet.  and delicious.

To make the ricotta filling, mix up the basil and ricotta and hard grated cheese and some salt and pepper, and taste.  Season with more salt or pepper however you like it.  Then add the egg, and beat until everything is of one mixture.

Spread the filling over the pie crust.  

Spread around the caramelized onions.

Lay the tomatoes out around the pie.  Maybe sprinkle with a little more grated cheese and a dash of salt.

Bake for 20min at ~350F. 

 Enjoy!

Roasted tofu

Yet another way to eat tofu!  This way was actually quite good - we marinated the tofu in a sauce, then roasted it on an oiled baking sheet until it was crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside.  Passed the Ed-rating with flying colors, too.  Turns out, tofu can be tasty, but we knew that.  It's just a protein to carry flavors.

The sauce was a mix of soy sauce, smoked maple syrup, butternut squash seed oil, and some sort of vinegar that I no longer remember.  And some salt, and possibly a dash of sriracha.  Tough to remember, but you basically want a sauce that's somewhat thick, with some sweetness in it so it'll caramelize nicely.  Balance the sweet/sour/salty/spicy and you'll have a winner.  I think we marinated the tofu for 15-20min, and I believe the tofu chunks took about 20min to brown up, and we flipped them once.  I recommend this one.  Make it.

Golden spaghetti

This was inspired by a post on Beyond Salmon, where she posted a recipe after spending a day working in a restaurant kitchen.  It looked like a tasty, interesting way to use a zucchini, and since I happened to have two different kinds of cheeses, making a pasta dish for lunch seemed like an excellent idea.  Can't say no to spaghetti in a creamy sauce with lots of cheese!  No Ed-rating, as he wasn't home for lunch, but I'll be trying this again for dinner sometime.  It was quite tasty.  I also really liked the idea of using the seeds of the squash for something useful, as opposed to slogging through eating them the normal way.  I've never been a huge fan of zucchini seeds.

Golden spaghetti:

Made enough for one large lunch.  I suppose you should add more pasta or another zucch if you want to stretch it.  This isn't Helen Rennie's original recipe, since I was missing a few key ingredients, like cream, and parsley.

1 golden zucchini

1/4 box of spaghetti

1-2tbs milk or cream

1 clove garlic, minced

~1/4C grated cheese (in my case, a mix of pecorino roman and ricotta salata)

salt and pepper to taste

Get a pot of water boiling for the spaghetti. Salt the water.

Using a mandolin, slice thin slices off the zucchini until you get to the seeds.  Rotate the squash, and continue, until you've sliced off all the non-seedy flesh in very thin slices.  Cut those slices lengthwise so that you have vaguely spaghetti-shaped pieces of squash.  Cut the seedy core of the remaining zucchini crosswise into pennies, and fry those in some olive oil on medium-high heat until they're browned on both sides.  Toast the garlic in the remaining oil, then add the zucchini seeds and garlic to a food processor or blender.  Add a dash or two of milk (or cream, if you have it… I had milk), and puree to a thick sauce.  Season with salt and pepper.

Once you've added the spaghetti to the water, fry the strands of squash in some olive oil or butter.  They'll take ~5min, at which point you should taste the spaghetti.  If it's ~3/4 of the way cooked, pull out some of the cooking water, then drain the rest of the pasta, and add it to the frying pan that has the zucchini.  Pour in the sauce, grate in the cheese, and continue to stir/cook until the spaghetti is cooked through.  If the sauce thickens up too much, add some of the pasta-cooking-water to thin it.  

Once it's done, plop in a wide bowl and enjoy!  Or you could try to twirl it into pretty little thingies, but that was too much work, really.  

Eggplant rollatini

Two weekends ago, after Tiffany's wedding, we'd stopped for lunch/dinner with Susan and Matt in the North End after playing at the aquarium all afternoon, at a super duper fancy pants restaurant, that happened to be taking part in restaurant week, so was offering a 3-course lunch for $20.  Sign me up!  I had the eggplant rollatini for the starter, and it was delicious.  I guess that's what you get when a dish depends on a sauce and a filling for flavor, and you're at a super duper fancy pants restaurant.  Ed had the fried calamari, which were good, but ultimately, they were still just fried squid.  Second course was some sort of lemony creamy caper chicken for me (yummm), and a spaghetti carbonara for Ed, which was also a three-m yummm.  Dessert was tiramisu, for me, and a cannoli, for Ed.  Dessert was a four-m yummmm!  

Anyway, this set me to hankerin' for some more eggplant rollatini, so I tried my hand at that the other night.  Overall, I'd say it was a success, though really, the sauce had to cook down for a lot longer than the 30min I gave it, and I should have sliced the eggplant waaay thinner.  But, it got a good Ed-rating, and made some darn tasty leftovers the next day, too.  I'd totally make this again.  

Start with a tomato sauce.  You could purchase a good one from a jar.  I had our landlords' tomato plants to look after, so I made a sauce.  It had lots of basil in it, some grated carrot (for sweetness), onion, garlic, and a roasted red pepper.  Fairly standard, but quite delicious.  

The sauce, after it's cooked down for a while.  Could have used another few hours bubbling away on the stove, preferably stirred thoughtfully by an Italian grandmother, but I was hungry NOW.  

So, like lasagne, this seemed like a lot of work and a lot of steps to make a meal.  But, like lasagne, all the steps were totally worth it.  I'll try my hand at a recipe... 

Eggplant Rollatini

Made enough for 4 people as a main course

1 eggplant (a wide one)

1/2lb ricotta cheese

2 handfulls fresh spinach

2 cloves garlic

~1/2C breadcrumbs or panko

1 egg

4C tomato sauce (homemade or store-bought, doesn't matter, but it better taste good)

Salt, to taste

some amount of freshly-grated parmesan or pecorino cheese

Tomato sauce

Tomatoes.  I think I had 4 big red tomatoes and 2C of yellow cherry tomatoes

1/2C fresh basil

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1 splash white wine

1 red pepper

1/2 a carrot, grated

Some olive oil

Set the oven to broil.

I'm going to write this recipe like you're making a tomato sauce.  If you're not, just skip the sauce-making instructions.

Dice the onion, and set it to sweating in a pan with some oil.

As that sweats, begin eggplant: slice your eggplant thinly.  Ed suggested using a mandolin, but I think that would be too thin.  Probably 1/4" thickness would be good.  Sprinkle some coarse salt (kosher salt) on both sides of the eggplant, and let it sit there oozing out its water as the oven preheats.  

Cut the red pepper in half, remove the seeds.  Place it skin-side up on a baking sheet, and broil for 5-15min, until the skin has black dots and is bubbly.  This means you can peel the skin easily.  Reduce oven temp to 400F.

As the pepper broils, work on the sauce.  Once the onion is sweated, add some diced garlic.  That'll want ~5min, you don't want to burn your garlic.  Then add the chopped tomatoes.  You'll be pureeing the sauce later, so don't worry about making the tomato chunks too small.  Add a healthy dash of white wine.  Grate the carrot, add to the sauce.  Chop the basil, add to the sauce.  Peel the pepper, add to the sauce.  Put a lid on that thing and let it go, while you do the eggplants - 

Wipe off the water that has oozed out of the eggplants.  Beat an egg with ~1tbs of water, in a small bowl.  Lightly oil the baking sheet your pepper had just been occupying.  Put down a sprinkle of breadcrumbs or panko (if using breadcrumbs, you can make those, too.  I happened to use up the rest of our panko).  Drag the eggplant through the egg, both sides, and let the extra egg drip off back into the bowl.  Then put the eggplant slices down on the baking sheet.  Sprinkle more breadcrumbs on the top side.  You'll probably need two baking sheets to fit all the eggplant.  Put the eggplant into the oven, and flip the slices after 10 minutes.  

Now for the ricotta filling.  Dice more garlic, and toast that in a pan with some olive oil.  Once it's toasted, add the chopped spinach.  Cook that until it's properly wilted.  Pull the pan off the heat.  Add the ricotta, stir it all around, grate in some hard cheese (pecorino or parmesan), sprinkle in some salt, taste, adjust.  Add the remainder of the egg from the eggplant-dipping station.  Stir it all around.  

Puree the sauce.  Don't burn yourself.  Pour half the sauce into the bottom of a large, high-sided baking dish.

When the eggplant is done, pull it out.  Put some filling at the fat end of the eggplant.  Roll it up, and place it, seam-side down, in the sauce in the baking dish.

Once all the eggplant slices have been filled and rolled, pour the rest of the sauce over the top of them.  Grate some more hard cheese on top.  

Put the whole shebang back into the oven, for 15min.  This just cooks the egg in the filling, and lets all the flavors meld together.  It also gives you a chance to clean all the dishes you just dirtied, and wipe the tomato sauce splashes off the wall.  Maybe even sit down and have a glass of that wine you splashed into the sauce.  

After 10-15min, pull out the eggplant rollatini.  Let it sit 5-10min to cool off a bit, and serve!  This would be even better if there had been some rustic sourdough bread to go along with it... but we didn't think that far ahead.  It was quite delicious nonetheless!  Totally worth all those steps.  I think the prep time was ~45min, which isn't too bad, considering how hungry I was when I started this.