#28. Eggplant Steaks with Feta Salad

I've become ambivalent about my food blogging. On one hand, it's been fun working toward my goal of trying 100 new recipes this year, and I've been enjoying all the new meals and desserts. And I feel like the blogging propels me to stay on track. On the other hand, I'm a little embarrassed to link to these on Twitter, so aside from going back to check my spelling, these entries get hardly any hits at all. So for this recipe at least, I'm only going to hit the high points and record what I learned.

This recipe is another from the Williams Sonoma book Easy Vegetarian. I just weirdly happened to have all the ingredients on hand except the feta, so what I really made was a vegan version, which was okay (I tried adding mozzarella, but it didn't work with the other flavors, especially the lemon).

One good takeaway from this recipe is the idea of broiling eggplant steaks (just thick slices, really) after coating them in olive oil and lemon juice and sprinkling them with salt and pepper and fresh thyme. The "feta" salad was okay, but there was way too much parsley, raw onion, and garlic. Just some olives, cucumber, tomatoes, and lemon juice would have been enough, and since that's most of a Greek salad, I bet feta would have tasted good with that.

Here's the final product (shown with mozzarella instead of feta):

Vegan version: B, Mozzarella Version: B-

A few weeks later (I'm really far behind writing these up) I tried baking (as opposed to broiling) some 1/2" thick eggplant slices on a foil-lined baking sheet with just olive oil (I omitted the lemon juice). That worked well (400 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes, with the slices leaning on each other to let heat circulate underneath--I hated having to turn the slices when I was broiling them--so hot!). Then I tried olive oil, sage, thyme and oregano, and that was good enough to eat plain, although both times I topped the eggplant with warmed up tomato basil pasta sauce (from a jar) and slices of mozzarella. If you don't count salting the eggplant slices and letting them stand for 30 minutes before rinsing, coating and cooking, this is actually a surprisingly quick and easy meal.

Pasta sauce version: A-