The Cost of Ruining Eggplant Parmesan

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

So I was really excited to make my eggplant Parmesan. I went on Amazon Prime Music and queued up Naxos’ Best of Opera albums—because if we’re going Italian, we’re going to theme it up—chopped up my eggplant, and popped it into the oven at 450 degrees, as per Jamie Oliver’s no-fry eggplant Parmesan recipe.

Jamie Oliver’s Eggplant Parmesan Recipe

Then I poured myself a glass of wine. It’s important to understand the order in which these things happened, because I do not want, in any way, for the three ounces of wine I consumed to be blamed for my inadvertently turning the knob past 450 and all the way to Broil.

20 minutes later, I had Jamie Oliver’s lovely sauce simmering and, when I went to remove my eggplants, a whole pile of charcoal.

This was heartbreaking. The eggplant slices had smelled so delicious, and then they sort of stopped smelling like anything, probably because they had turned into carbon. Is this what carbonara means? Can I salvage this?

I tried, anyway. I pulled the eggplant slices out of the oven, composted the ones that were completely burned, and stirred the half-burned slices into the sauce along with a bunch of snow peas that I usually eat for lunch, with hummus, but… this thing needed some fresh vegetables, along with the burned ones.

Then I added the parmesan and bread crumbs, as per Jamie Oliver, and put it back into the oven to bake.

(Also, I googled “carbonara.” It has nothing to do with burned eggplant at all.)

The result wasn’t bad, in that nothing with that much cheese, garlic, and breading can really be bad. It was kind of like a stew? It was warm, and there was a lot of cheese and tomato, and the rest of it was pretty inconsequential. Every once in a while I’d get a bite of eggplant and be reminded of what might have been.

I wouldn’t serve it to friends, but I’ll end up serving it to myself again tomorrow, probably. Unless I get inspired to compost it all.

The cost of ruining eggplant Parmesan and making something else instead:

A $1.49 eggplant. So beautiful, so much of it wasted. I guess the worms will get to eat it, or something.

$2.69 for a large can of S&W crushed tomatoes.

Maybe $0.50 of Signature Select extra virgin olive oil.

$0.05 each of pepper, basil, and oregano, or $0.15.

The entire thing of Primo Taglio shredded Parmesan, priced at $3.99.

A third of the thing of Signature Select breadcrumbs, priced at $1.50.

About $1 worth of snow peas, from one of those big bags with $5 written on it.

Roughly $4 of a bottle of Erath Pinot Noir, which I bought because the bottle copy had some garble about how “earth” and “heart” used the same letters and my nerd heart was touched, I tell you.

The $1.25 box of Russell Stover chocolates that I had bought to eat on Valentine’s Day but ended up eating after the meal so I’d have something that tasted the way it was supposed to.

TOTAL: $16.57

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