It’s been a snowy week here in Richmond and I’ve definitely been in the mood for comfort food. Because of the snow though, I’m leaving the house even earlier and getting home even later in an attempt to be on the road when there are few other cars. So my twelve-hour work days have been closer to fourteen hours. On days like these, I need really easy comfort food!
This eggplant casserole is one of the easiest things I can think of. It’s kind of the opposite of my previous post on the all-carbs-all-the-time pierogi lasagna; I’ve completely eliminated the pasta altogether. The other beautiful thing about this recipe is how great it is as a leftover. In fact, I really, really recommend you don’t even try it fresh. Frankly, it’s a bowl full of garbage the first day you make it. I guess the flavors really need time to marry or something? Anyway, seriously this is disgusting fresh. But it’s delicious one or two days later so you could easily cook this on a Sunday and serve it for dinner pretty much any day that week.
So anyway, here’s the recipe:
- 1 large globe eggplant
- 1 jar of tomato sauce
- ricotta cheese
- shredded mozzarella
Preheat oven to 400 F. Slice the eggplant in 1/4″ slices. 
Spray a cookie sheet with olive oil and arrange the eggplant slices in a single layer. Spray again with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. 
Bake ten to fifteen minutes, until the slices are soft and start to turn golden. Meanwhile, cover the bottom of a 9×9″ baking pan with some of your sauce. Now, pouring some sauce into a pan sure as hell didn’t take ten to fifteen minutes, did it? So since the whole premise of this blog was supposed to be about how I get shit done I’ll tell you that at this point I emptied the dishwasher. Then I ran to my bedroom, stripped off my clothes and changed into pajamas. And still had a couple minutes of just standing around waiting for the eggplant to finish cooking. 
Now that your eggplant slices are cooked, line the bottom of the casserole with the slices. Don’t use the slices that are all skin. Those are too difficult to cut once your lasagna is done, but they make delicious cook’s snacks while you’re waiting!
Cover with a think layer of ricotta.
Now add some shredded mozzarella.
Repeat the layers until you’ve either run out of eggplant or filled up your casserole dish. Now cover with some greased aluminum foil and bake for 45 minutes. So now you have 45 minutes to kill! I used this time to put up a load of laundry, catch up on my email, and do some data analysis from work.
Now comes the most important step: do not eat this hot mess. I know I already said it before, but I cannot exaggerate how bad this is on the day you cook it! Really, truly horrible slop. But it was delicious last night (two days after I baked it). 
