In a Word...YUM

I've been hooked on this new show, "The Chew," which airs in my region of the world at 1pm EST on ABC. It's got style and fashion god Clinton Kelly, super chef Mario Batali, Iron chef Michael Symon, Dr. Oz's daughter Daphne (who is so sweet, you can just see why Dr. Oz adores his kids) and new kid on the block chef Carla Hall.

Lots of the recipes they've run in the first week have appealed to me (my poor printer is burning through the pages, LOL) but I happened to have the ingredients for Clinton Kelly's Eggplant Parmesan on hand, so I decided to make that for dinner.

All I can say is YUM. It was awesome. Totally awesome. The recipe recommends jarred sauce but Clinton said he always uses homemade (I wish he'd share his recipe...it sounded great), and I did, too. The last layer, I ran out of homemade sauce, so I did add a tiny bit of Ragu ;-) but you couldn't tell the difference. The fresh sauce--made from tomatoes in my garden and frozen a couple weeks ago--really added that extra depth of flavor to the sauce.

Eggplant parm is a lot of work (anything breaded is) but it was worth it. I could have eaten the whole pan myself ;-) The recipe really does use all those cups of bread crumbs and all those eggs, so don't skimp when you're laying it out. Also, I always use a set of pie plates for my breading steps, because they are shallow but edged, and they are easy to clean in the dishwasher. Use one hand to bread and let that be the goopy hand, while keeping the other hand clean to flip the fying eggplant. I did fry the eggplant in two pans, so that moved the process along a lot faster. I pulled it out of the oven after about 32 minutes and let it sit for 10 minutes before serving. DH LOVED it and said this recipe has to be on my must-serve list ;-)

Recipe is here. Check out the site while you're there--there's lots of great, easy, and cheap recipes to choose from!

Shirley

Vegetarian "Chicken" and Dumplings...w/o the Chicken ;-)

My daughter has become a vegetarian, which has made for alittle bit of a challenge in cooking. For a lot of my recipes for her, I've been using the Cooking Light Vegetarian cookbook. (Except for tonight's recipe, which came from Rachael Ray's magazine...more on that recipe in a minute).


I love the Cooking Light cookbook because it not only has the "what is it" info (like what is tempeh) but also step-by-step directions that go straight back to the basics of cooking. It shows you how to prepare tofu, what to do with lentils, even slicing tomatoes (perfect for my child, who needed help making a three-ingredient panini, LOL). When she goes off to college, I'm packing this for her...and hoping she cooks from this instead opening a can of raviolis ;-)


Anyway, before the vegetarian days, her favorite soup was Chicken and Dumpling. I couldn't do that, so when I saw a vegetarian version in Rachael Ray Magazine, I had to try it.


I followed the recipe to a T...except I mixed in a mixture of parsley and this new freeze-dried dill (have you tried these? They're nearly as good as fresh, better than dried) into the dumplings. I also made double the amount of dumplings because I knew my family would love them.


Verdict--EVERYONE in the family loved it and no one noticed the chicken wasn't there. My daughter had the biggest bowl of soup I've ever seen her eat, LOL.

Shirley