Eggplant Parmigiana with Alfredo Sauce

Today's lunch is brought to you by the letter "L". L for leftovers.

So we still had some leftover eggplant parmigiana from the last time and I did mention that I ran out of tomato sauce, didn't I ? I rummaged around the refrigerator and found some leftover Alfredo sauce.

Guess what I did next ?

Yep, I made some rotini pasta (not leftovers, haha!) and poured the rest of the Alfredo sauce on it. Poured a little sauce on the eggplant parmigiana too and I liked how it turned out. Somehow, the tartness of the tomato sauce got balanced out by the cream sauce.

Hubby, on the other hand, is still not convinced. He prefers this the classic way - with tomato sauce - rather than my way.

Eggplant Parmigiana

Tonight's dinner was eggplant parmigiana. I've been looking forward to this for a few reasons:

a) because as much as I dislike veggies, eggplant just happens to be one of the ones that I love!

b) because my friend Kay, a very good chef/cook, had recently prepared this for her family and her pictures made me crave this. She kindly shared the recipe in her FB site.

And as a disclaimer, I would like to point out that I did deviate from the original recipe a little because the eggplant has been sitting in our refrigerator for a week now and I was still missing some ingredients. I also wasn't in the mood to fry because we didn't have enough cooking oil. And I had some frozen chopped spinach leaves in the freezer that I wanted to use up.

Ingredients:

- Eggplant

- 2 eggs

- bread crumbs (orig recipe called for flour)

- Traditional pasta sauce (bottled)

- chopped spinach

- parmesan cheese

- mozzarella cheese

Steps:

1. Peel and slice the eggplants, 1/2 cm thick. Sprinkle side with salt and layer it in between paper towels. Leave in the refrigerator overnight. Kay says that this will draw out the excess moisture and will draw out the bitterness of the eggplant.

2. Dip the eggplant slices in beaten egg and dip in breadcrumbs.

3. Oil a baking sheet and arrange the eggplant slices in a single layer. Bake in a 350 degree F oven till tender.

4. In a baking dish, pour a thin layer of tomato sauce on the bottom of the dish. Arrange a layer of eggplant slices, pour another thin layer of sauce, top with the chopped spinach leaves, parmesan and mozzarella.

Repeat step 4 (sauce, eggplant, sauce, spinach, cheeses) until all the eggplant slices are used up.

5. Pop into the oven and bake until the cheeses melt and begin to brown.

Oh, I would've paired this with pasta but I ran out of pasta sauce as well so we paired this with some freshly baked garlic bread instead. Yummy!

This post just reminded me to stock up our pantry again.

Pork Afritada

I found some leftover pork shoulder in the freezer and decided to cook this for dinner with some tomato sauce. Did some searching on the net and found a lot of recipes for Pork Menudo and Pork Afritada, the ingredients differed. Eventually, I just picked the one recipe that had the least amount of ingredients from AllFavoriteRecipe.

I started off from that recipe and tweaked a few measurements, this was what I did:

• 1 lb pork, cubed
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 onion, sliced
• 1 tbsp fish sauce (patis)
• 2 potatoes (Russet), peeled and quartered
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 cup tomato sauce
• 1 green bell pepper, sliced

1. Season the diced pork with salt and pepper and set aside in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.
2. In a saucepan, heat oil and saute pork until no longer pink. If juices come out, spoon them out and throw away.
3. Add the garlic and onion, saute till onions are clear.
4. Season the pork with the fish sauce.
5. Add the potatoes (NOTE: if using Russet potatoes, do not add them at this time as they cook easily and will fall apart before your pork becomes tender).
6. Add the tomato sauce and water
7. Bring to a boil and simmer on low heat for 25 to 30 minutes until pork is soft.
8. Add the bell pepper and let simmer.

This turned out quite good, the only issue we have is that we used Russet potatoes and they cooked too quickly. Will have to add them into the pot a bit later (maybe 10 to 15 minutes later) so they don't get too soft.

Taste wise, this turned out good.

Fried Tofu

Tofu has always been a favorite in our kitchen but we don't get to try a lot of different dishes, mostly because we do not know how to prepare them and we usually stick with what we know.

Recently, Mom brought a vegetarian cookbook and left it with me because she says that we might make more use of it than she did. True to her words, I went through the book immediately and found a recipe for this simple fried tofu dish.

1. Dice tofu and scald with boiling water for 1 minute (to half-cook the tofu).

2. Drain the tofu on paper towels.

3. Dip the tofu in egg and then coat with flour.

4. Deep fry in hot oil.

For the sauce:

3 tbsp lite soy sauce

2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely

1 tsp sugar

2 tsp sesame oil (did not put this much)

Pizza Day

Saturday night last weekend was pizza day for hubby and me. We made the crust (using the same recipe as before) - he wanted to knead and thought it was fun - together and we divided it up and formed and topped our own pizzas since we wanted different toppings.

Hubby's pizza had a tomato-based sauce ( tomato sauce + tomato paste and seasoned with oregano, onion powder and garlic powder). He topped it with mozzarella cheese, ham, meatball pieces (Ikea swedish meatballs), bacon, pepperoni and more mozzarella.


My pizza sauce was cream-based, I used plain creamy Alfredo sauce from a bottle. I topped mine with spinach, ham, meatball pieces, bacon and mozzarella cheese.

We dropped by the supermarket to get some fresh mushrooms but I forgot to take them out when we were preparing the pizzas.

The crust is still not as nice as I would like them to be. It's okay to eat while it is fresh out of the oven but it gets harder when it cools. Konting experiment pa and we can probably invite friends over for a make-your-own pizza dinner sometime.

Pork Giniling

I've been a fan of Eating Club Vancouver's dishes ever since I found an Aristocrat-style-chicken-bbq recipe on their site a year ago.



I've been trying out more and more of their dishes and this time, it's their Mom's classic Pork Giniling dish (ground pork). Check out their site which is very helpful because they posted pictures of each step in the cooking process.


Ingredients:
2 lbs ground pork
1 tsp vinegar (optional)
pepper
chopped garlic
1 cup of diced carrots
1 cup of diced potato
1 tbsp shao xing wine (I substituted cooking sherry instead)
1 tbsp oyster sauce
4 tbsp soy sauce
2 cups water (approximate)


This is a short-cut version of the recipe, check out the original post for more detailed descriptions:

1. Brown the ground pork, add the vinegar and drain / scoop out the fluids that will come out from the pork.
2. season with pepper and mix around
3. add the chopped garlic, carrots and potato
4. add the cooking wine and oyster sauce and mix around
5. add the soy sauce and water, let boil & simmer till cooked.

Marinated Chicken Kebabs & Herbed Potato Slices

A good friend shared a recipe that she saw on TV (a Filipino channel), when she was describing the dish to me, I did a google search and found the exact same recipe posted on Epicurious.com.

Marinated Chicken Kebabs with Lemon-Pepper Yoghurt Sauce

Admittedly, this was my first time cooking with Rosemary and I was a bit too enthusiastic and generous with this herb. The chicken (thankfully) turned out well and hubby gives his seal of approval although he did request that I make it with bigger chicken chunks next time.

Marinade:
2 cups extra virgin olive oil
juice of 3 lemons
2 tbsp chopped garlic
3/4 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary leaves (I used dried rosemary leaves)
3/4 tbsp fresh thyme leaves (did not use these)
6 single boneless, skinless chicken breasts ( I used boneless, skinless thighs instead)
salt and pepper to taste

1. Slice the chicken in to smaller chunks (cubes).
2. Combine the ingredients and toss with the chicken chunks and leave this in the refrigerator overnight.
3. Instead of grilling, I popped this in a 400F oven for 30 minutes (until cooked).

The chicken turned out wonderful. I did try to make the Yoghurt sauce as described but it didn't go too well with us and we ended up throwing most of it away.


While thinking about what would best accompany the chicken as a side dish, I remembered a post from my favorite food blogger - PinoyCook's Grilled herbed liempo and potatoes. Inspired, I decided to slice up some potatoes, season them with rosemary, oregano, salt and pepper and arrange them underneath the chicken slices ala Pinoy cook.

When done, the potatoes absorbed the flavor from the chicken drippings and herbs and tasted wonderful!