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.