Don't tell my kids that I'm changing the way I make eggplant parmesan. I've taken great precautions and if they find out, things could get ugly. The last time I changed an established recipe was Thanksgiving 1998, when I made stuffing with Italian parsley, pine nuts, parmesan and bacon. The wishbone wish that year was that I would choke and die.
I have been making eggplant parmesan with the same recipe since 1983. I don't make it the way you'd get it in an Italian restaurant, all thick and steaky, arranged in a slightly overlapping angle with sauce drizzled and cheese melted on top. That would make way too much sense. My eggplant parmesan is more like a lasagna, with layers of sauce, cheese, and 700 thin slices of eggplant that I bread and fry in oil. Once assembled, this hot mess swims in a sea of grease that comes seeping out of the fried eggplant once it starts to heat up in the oven. The oil in this dish is in a tight race with the two pounds of mozzarella for the thing that will have you in a pacemaker by your late 20s.
My kids would give up a limb each for one serving.
Here's a conversation with them about eggplant parmesan.
One kid: "Aunt Kathy made eggplant parmesan and it was so good!
Me: "Aunt Kathy bakes her eggplant instead of frying it before putting it together. It's a lot less oily than mine. If you guys liked it - "
Another kid: "We did like it."
Yet another kid: "We loved it."
Another kid, possibly not mine, since I only have three: "It was really really good."
Me: "- then maybe I should try baking my eggplant instead of frying it."
Silence, while spears are sharpened, a child advocate attorney is called, and a fire pit is built in the family room.
Seriously, I can't change anything about the way I cook, even if it's an improvement. I'm not even allowed to add soy sauce to the green bean french-fried onion casserole, even though the original recipe calls for it.
"I've been making it without soy sauce for so long, I didn't even realize," I said, after reading the recipe on the back of a can of green beans.
"Don't even think about it," my kids growled. Speaking to your mother in the menacing voice of Satan should be illegal. Why is there no such thing as a parent advocate attorney?
Every time my kids come home I make the same dishes in the exact same way. Our holiday dinners are the most extreme examples of this. I season the turkey the same, I make the same mashed potatoes, the same sweet potato recipe, the same stuffing recipe (having learned my lesson from the Thanksgiving Stuffing Fiasco of 1998), deviled eggs, orange Jell-O brand gelatin with mandarin oranges, and the pumpkin pie recipe on the back of the Libby's canned pumpkin. I could make this meal in a drunken stupor. Don't ask me how I know that.
It's sad because our world is full of really great recipes on Pinterest and Facebook - those Tasty! videos are the best/worst - and I can't make them because we would be the first family to have a food fight with casualties.
None of my kids live here anymore, so for the past few years I've been able to cook without their noses in my business. And like a prisoner with kitchen detail who finally gets sprung, I've started to test the waters and tweak some of my recipes. I decided to start baking the eggplant for my eggplant parmesan.
But because there is no such thing as a parent advocate attorney and I fear my kids almost as much as I respect their tenacity, I'm doing it one eggplant slice at a time. I started by baking one tray of eggplant and frying the rest. When assembling it, I carefully scattered the baked ones throughout in a complex 3-D pattern so that no one bite would be entirely baked. They didn't notice.
Each time I made it, I increased slightly the number of baked eggplant slices. Last week I made it for my daughter and I am now up to two large trays of baked, making the baked-to-fried ratio about 7:16.
If all goes according to my plan, in about three years my kids will be wolfing down fat-free eggplant parmesan with skim mozzarella cheese and organic tomato sauce, clueless that their mother's love is saving them from heart disease.
And then, the following Thanksgiving, one rosemary needle goes into the sweet potatoes.
