Day Five: Grab 'n Go

Only five days in and this is starting to wear on me. I think if I make it through the next week it'll get easier. I'm starting to learn that vegetarian or not, speed is the trick. I've spent a lot of time in the last several days cooking. Meat doesn't take any longer or shorter and I'm going to have to find some really clever tricks to reduce cooking times.

Eggplant Parmesan subs are on the menu for today. I've spent the last few days getting the eggplant ready. It's been a great lesson on how to prep something for frying. Here's the method:

• Two days before, soak the subject in milk. Let soak overnight in the fridge. I found a jar that fit my eggplant spears tightly and used buttermilk.
• The day before, dip the subject first in a mixture of flour and cornstarch, then beaten egg, then cornstarch, flour and breadcrumbs. If there's seasoning, it goes in the third mixture. Let it cool overnight again.
• Fry at 350 until brown. Drain and allow to cool slightly.

I've had problems in the past getting the breading to stick to the thing I was frying. That problem is completely solved. Nothing fell off at all this time and it all stuck to the eggplant, even where there was skin. They did dry out a little in the fridge the second cooling, but covering them should solve that.

I had sub rolls from a couple days ago. This time I cheated a little and used some cheap canned pasta sauce rather than making my own. It would be better if I had leftover pasta sauce but I didn't. Bread, eggplant, sauce, mozarella, nuke for 90 seconds then bake at 350 for about 10 minutes.

"Parmesan," doesn't mean you use Parmesan cheese. It means in the style of Parma, a place in Italy, where at some point in the past, the going trend was to cover in red sauce and cheese. If you use that much cheese, you'd need something wetter and milder. Parmesan Reggiano has too much aroma and is too oily for this. If you want to garnish with a little Parmesan on top before baking, that would work. I'm not a huge fan of aromatic cheeses so I went with simple.

Perfect. Better than the Italian-run delis in Brooklyn. It took me less than 5 minutes of prep time all together today, 15 minutes end-to-end. Of course, I had the important part waiting already.

Yesterday's stock was... well... cabbage-y. It wasn't as strong as I thought it would be but you can definitely taste it. I probably wouldn't mix too much cabbage with carrots because I'm not sure how good they'd taste together. Of course, since it's my research project and in the spirit of don't-try-this-at-home, I'm going to make cabbage and carrot stock tomorrow. But today it's parsnips. As usual, onions too, because they are the base of this. I also put in a bay leaf every time.

I also put a bag of dried lentils and stock in the slow cooker yesterday. I'm going to have to find something good to do with them tomorrow because I need to move them out of the slow cooker. I need a pot of cream of mushroom soup and I'm going to have to throw together a stew that'll double as a pot pie and I'm not willing to sit over the stove to let that all cook up.