could be even less healthy

Here are one of my absolute favorite foods: fried eggplants. Why favorite? Because they're simply dripping with lovely oil and flour and so melt in your mouth, just like M&M's. What's not to love?



My recipe (which is not as awfully fatty as the recipe found in this cookbook, which I got as a present for my birthday) goes as follows:

- Wash and cut up the eggplant into halfmoons (that term comes right out of the Italian cookbook, because I am certainly not sophisticated enough to come up with it on my own).

- Lay the pieces out on a cutting board. Salt on both sides, and leave it out for about an hour. After the hour is up, pat the eggplants dry with a paper towel (according to my mom - that gets the bitterness out, and it seems to do the trick, because they really are never bitter after that, but I must admit that I never tried this without the patting).

- Heat up olive oil, and prepare flour in a separate dish. Dip each halfmoon in the flour, and fry in the oil, turning when the first side becomes a golden brown color. Eggplants absorb oil like you wouldn't believe, so I keep having to pour more every couple of minutes, otherwise everything burns.

- When eggplants are ready, lay them out on a platter, and allow to cool. Then make the sauce: Mix mayo, mustard, couple of cloves of garlic, and dill. (Honey mustard would work best, but I only had dijon mustard at home, which can do also).

- Spread sauce on the eggplants sparingly. Or, if you're a glutton like me, sread it out generously because the sauce is the best part.


Believe it or not, the Italian cookbook makes you use not just flour, but also egg and bread crumbs to fry up the eggplants. I am not a big fan of bread crumbs, so I wouldn't venture to try it.