Sunday, March 18, 2012

366 Photo Project - Photo 28: Lasagna

We had some eggplant that's been sitting around for a while. Typically we only have two ways of eating eggplant. 
1. Diced and stir-fried with tofu, oyster sauce, garlic and other Asian yummies. 
2. Sliced into thin sheets and grilled either on the BBQ or in the oven, typically with zucchini. 
I didn't feel like either of those things so we decided to make a lasagna instead. One may think we'd go for a vegetarian lasagna since we were using eggplant but we didn't. We fried up some ground turkey with a ton of garlic, onions, carrots and celery. Added a can of diced tomatoes with the juices all drained off, 1/2 a can of tomato paste, 1 jar of ready to use pasta sauce, salt, pepper, oregano and basil. What we really wanted to do was to eliminate the pasta sheets and replace them with eggplant instead. I knew there'd be a lot of liquid from the eggplant so I tried to cook out as much of the other liquids as possible. We layered the sauce with eggplant, cottage cheese, grated cheddar and parmesan. Even baking without a cover, the liquid that formed was still a lot. We baked it at 400 degrees and dropped it down to 350 when the top was starting to brown a bit too much. You can see from the second picture that we had a good 1/2" of liquid. It would've been so delicious if there were pasta sheets to soak up all that goodness. Instead, we just let it sit in the pan and Jamie suggested we heat it up and pour it on pasta the next day. By the time I got to it the next day though, a lot of the sauce had solidified and virtually disappeared so it all worked out. Perhaps the next time we make this, I'll throw in something starchy to soak up bit of the juice. 

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