Fork and Gobble It: Embracing my Heritage

We have an event going on at Joe Canal's in Woodbridge this weekend. Tony Sirico, the actor who played Paulie Walnuts on HBO's series The Sopranos will be doing an appearance at the store on Saturday. I always enjoyed the show and didn't really get too caught up in the whole "portraying Italian Americans in a bad light" thing. One aspect of the show that I really did enjoy was the food. When I was a kid we really did eat dinner at Nona's every Sunday. My grandmother would cook enough for three armies and we'd all convene at her little apartment in Bloomfield, NJ and eat. While that tradition unfortunately has gone away in my family, I still recall those recipes and turn to them regularly. This week I realized there was one dish that even through the course of all these years I had not prepared in my own kitchen... Eggplant Parmigiana! Not the version you get in any pizzeria that uses frozen breaded eggplant slices and canned sauce, but the real deal. The kind of preparation you start knowing you'd better fry off more eggplant than you need because anyone who passes through the kitchen will be picking at the freshly fried slices, crisp in their coating of seasoned breadcrumb and moist and tender on the inside. Yeah, this had to be done.

It is an assembly of a dish with multiple steps especially if, like myself, you make everything from scratch including the "Italian Seasoned Breadcrumbs." Where did they get that from anyway?

This recipe makes one large (10.5”x 14.5”) pan.
-7 cups fresh breadcrumbs seasoned with:
--1 ½ cups grated parmigiana cheese
--½ cup dried basil
--½ cup dried oregano

-3 cups of flour seasoned with:
--2 Tbsps salt
--1 Tsp black pepper

-7 eggs lightly beaten

-5 small to medium purple eggplants, peeled and sliced into discs 1/2" thick

Bread the eggplant by first dredging in the flour and shaking off the excess, then dipping in egg, and then coating with the breadcrumbs. In order to keep your hands relatively clean and more workable, use only one hand to coat the slices with egg so that one hand is wet and the other remains dry.

When all the eggplant is breaded, get a large skillet and fill it with ½ olive oil, ½ vegetable oil to a depth of about 1" and heat it over a medium flame. The oil is ready for frying when a tiny amount of breadcrumb is dropped in and it falls to the bottom of the oil and immediately rises and begins to fry.

You will now need:

-1 quart tomato sauce
-1 pound mozzarella cheese, sliced very thin
-more grated parmigiana cheese

When all the slices are fried, take the baking dish and ladle some tomato sauce into it just enough to coat the bottom. Put in a layer of eggplant slices. Top this with scattered slices of mozzarella and sprinkle grated parm on that. Then repeat ~ sauce, eggplant, cheese, until the pan is filled.

Pre-heat the oven to 350F.

Finish off the top layer with a generous amount of sliced and grated cheese and a little more sauce. Cover the pan with a piece of parchment or wax paper and then aluminum foil. Bake for 30 mins covered and then remove the paper and foil and finish baking until golden brown.

Allow the pan to cool for about 15 minutes, portion and serve with more grated parmigiana cheese.

Nona would have been proud. Come to think of it, I should have saved some for Paulie. It would be nice to see the expression on his face.

We did pop a cork on a Chianti that night. Monteguelfo Chianti is medium to light in body with flavors of cherry, tobacco, and bright acidity to keep up with all that tomato sauce. It is silly inexpensive too. Just the kind of thing you want to be drinking watching Sopranos re-runs... Kapeeesh?