December 14, 2015 Lunch – Chirashi Donburi at Azuma, Dinner – EggplantI Parmigiana

December 14, 2015 Lunch – Chirashi Donburi at Azuma, Dinner – EggplantI Parmigiana 

I met Robert Mueller for lunch at Azuma.  I ordered us our usual when I arrived ahead of him, Chirashi Donburi, which is a box half filled with sushi rice with a layer of raw seafood (sashimi) on top of the rice.  Azuma includes 12 slices of seafood per order and over the years I have selected the twelve I like the best and order them each time: 2 salmon, 2 red tuna (Mauro), 2 octopus, 2 ultra white, and 4 yellowtail (hamachi) plus two pieces of omelet and two pieces of pickled daikon.

After lunch I stopped at Fano Bakery and purchased a baguette for $3.00.

When Suzette arrived home around 5:30 we discussed dinner.  I was prepared to make Ma Po Dofu, but Suzette wanted to make Eggplant Parmigiana, so I sliced an eggplant and grated about ¾ cup a Pecorino Romano cheese, while Suzette toasted old french baguette pieces in the oven for about fifteen minutes and then ground them into bread crumbs in the Cuisinart.  The she broke an egg into a shallow bowl and stirred it until it homogenized and mixed the bread crumbs with the grated cheese in another shallow bowl.  She dipped the slices of eggplant first into the egg to coat them and then the cheese and crumb mixture to coat them with a layer of crumbs.  Suzette then fried the crumb coated slices of eggplant in about ¼ inch of canola oil to fix the coating and partially cook the eggplant slices.  Then Suzette lay the cooked slices of eggplant in a ceramic baking dish with slices of fresh mozzarella cheese and covered the dish with spaghetti sauce and baked the eggplant dish in the oven for about twenty minutes to heat the dish thoroughly and melt the mozzarella.

When the eggplant parmigiana was almost ready Suzette heated the PPI Gemelli pasta from last night and lay a pile of pasta on plate and then topped it with slices of eggplant parmigiana and sauce.

I had opened a bottle of 2013 Tuella Portuguese red wine from the Duero River Valley (Trader Joe's $5.99) earlier when we ate snacks of fresh toasted Fano baguette with duck liver pate (Lowe’s market for $7.99 for 6 oz. and Petit Basque cheese, so we drank the rest of the bottle with dinner.

Suzette’s Eggplant Parmigiana is wonderful and the dish was easy to prepare because we already had 2/3 of it fixed; the pasta and the spaghetti sauce.

Bon Appetit 

T