Jamie Oliver is generally a great inspiration for cooking so when I volunteered to come with an idea for what to cook for supper last Saturday I decided to turn to his website for a recipe. After looking at way too many and deciding that they all looked delicious I managed to pick my three favorites which I emailed to my boyfriend and he picked this one out of those three:
Jamie Oliver’s Aubergine Parmigiana
But of course it’s the very end of winter/the beginning of spring which of course doesn’t mean much in Saskatchewan (it’s still pretty much just winter) so we encountered a little difficulty finding produce. Sometimes you can find things in the middle of winter no problem – I guess it just depends when the delivery truck gets there in relation to when you get there. Safeway had no Aubergines, and Souleio – our local organic grocery store had some! But they looked terrible and were expensive. So no aubergines, but Jamie did say you could use fennel as a substitute so we used that, and threw some zucchini in for good measure.
| Here are some tomatoes we blanched and removed the skin from for the tomato sauce. They still look fairly red here I suppose but being winter time they lost their colour during the cooking process rather disappointingly. They still tasted pretty good but as you’ll see in an up coming picture they almost get kind of a pinky colour which isn’t the greatest thing, especially when you go to the trouble of making home made tomato sauce rather than just pouring it from a jar, but what can you do? Can’t wait for summer when you can grow your own, those taste AMAZING!!! |  |
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Here you can see some of the peeled and chopped zucchini slices roasting in the toaster oven. We did this for roughly half of the slices and the other half went in the full sized oven with the chopped up fennel where they were also roasted. I didn’t get a picture of that because you can’t really see into the full sized oven that well, but if you can use your imagination… chopped up fennel and zucchini in a pan, in an oven. It smelled AMAZING! |
| Next there were some onions to saute for the tomato sauce and then we added those to the tomatoes and let them reduce down into a nice home made sauce which you will see in the next picture. |  |
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As you can see here this is the tomato layer. You can probably see some of the nicely sauteed onions as well. You can also notice how the tomatoes unfortunately lost some of their nice red colouring which was unfortunate but a sad part of the Saskatchewan growing season I guess – we have to ship them in and that’s what happens I suppose? |
| This is the super fun fennel and zucchini layer. So now if you were having trouble picturing what a bunch of zuchinni and fennel hanging out looks like, well this is pretty much it. I had never had fennel before, but this was a very positive first experience. It looked pretty, smelled amazing, and tasted delicious! |  |
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Everyone’s favorite part – the healthy dose of parmesan cheese! After this you repeat the tomato sauce layer again, then fennel and zucchini layer again and then even more parmesan cheese! |
| Then you put the tiny little bit of tomato sauce left on top and some mozzarella cheese. Oh dear there is a lot of cheese on this, but some how I don’t think people will mind. Then more parmesan, because this is after all a parmigiana dish! |  |
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Add some bread crumbs to the top of your cheesy abomination and into the oven with it! |
| Then it comes out all yummy and delicious looking like this if all goes according to plan |  |
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Served with some lamb sausage from the Bulk Cheese Warehouse and served on top of a Restoration Hardware catalog (because that just makes everything better) and it is delicious. We will definitely be trying this again when the tomatoes are in better season, and with aubergines next time for sure. I highly recommend this recipe. You can try it for yourself at Jamie Oliver’s website: |
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pasta-recipes/melanzane-alla-parmigiana-aubergine
