Eggplant Sandwich!!!

In terms off eggplant, I am definitely not an egghead. Sure, I've helped my parents flip eggplant on the BBQ grill, and I often eat Chinese stir fries with eggplant. I've just never truly cooked eggplant before. Or baked it. Or boiled it. I'm not really sure how to cook eggplant without usurping it of its nutrients, or adding a lot of oil (like my mum does when we have stir fries).

I don't want to make eggplant stir fry mainly because the eggplant from Chinatown looks so darn fresh (though it's definitely not "organic" in any sense of the word! I can tell they sprayed it with ethylene gas, because the surfaces underneath the leaves are still white). I also don't have any oil. I know, this sounds really stupid; oil/butter/other fats are a staple in a kitchen, especially when cooking, but I'm someone going to survive these two months without them (I think). One week down.

These are "cylindrical" eggplants...not the "teardrop-shaped" ones.

Apparently, eggplant can be eaten raw, although it may be bitter. I tried a chunk before I baked these, and they weren't bitter at all; they were actually kind of sweet and spongy, with a bit of moisture. I prefer them cooked, though.

After doing some research and reading a recipe, I figured that I should just slice my eggplant, salt the slices (yeah, I have a lot of salt, pepper, garlic powder, and Italian Pizza Seasoning, but no oil.), rinse the slices, and stick them on a cookie sheet for 20 minutes at 375F... and just see what happens.

I learned a few things:

1. I feel very self-conscious when I prepare and cook food in front of strangers. I felt very shy cutting eggplant while another girl in the apartment was waiting for her mac and cheese to bake.

2. Eggplant should be sliced at an angle, not cut like cucumbers.

3. Salting and rinsing sounds easy, but actually is really annoying because you use a ton of paper towels. After using three segments for four slices of eggplant, I decided to just stick everything on the cookie sheet and just bake it and see what happens. I should've added some pepper, but oh well.

The methodology for neophytes like me is this:

1. Do not peel eggplants. Evenly slice eggplants at an angle. Unfortunately, my slices ranged from 1 cm to 3 cm.

2. Pour some salt/pepper on your hand/plate, dip both sides of the eggplant flesh into it, and place the slice of eggplant on the cookie sheet. You do not need aluminium foil.

3. Repeat.

4. Bake at 350F (the oven was preheated due to the mac and cheese) on the bottom rack for 10-20 minutes. Since there is no baking soda/powder in this recipe, you can open the oven a lot to prod the eggplants.

5. Poke eggplant with a fork to see if is squishy and gooey yet (If it still looks white, it's not really done, but it's edible).

6. Turn off oven and let sit for however long you want, if you want something more sludgy.

7. Stick in sandwiches!!

Notice that there is NO OIL INVOLVED.

So I made a spinach, cheese and eggplant with herbs sandwich, which I stuck on the sandwich grill/press that we have in the apartment. It's a really efficient non-stick grill. It's amazing!!!

Almond Nut-Thins

These remind me of the rice cracker things that I used to eat when I was in HK, so it's not such a novel concept. The ones in HK were cheaper and did not advertise so blatantly. I'm still very irked by the "Wheat and Gluten Free" label, as though not eating gluten is somehow "healthier" than eating gluten for 99% of the population (a.k.a. the non-celiacs).

Also, "Irresistible Snacking!" = "Smart Eating" ??? DOES NOT COMPILE. How can snacking 24/7, which is what I do (unfortunately), equate smart eating?

Also, I know this happens for every single packaged good, but Blue Diamond really should make the box smaller. The crackers take up half the space of the box. Okay, fine, 60%.

After my fragmented paragraphs above (I'm running on 4 hours of sleep right now and I just did not-alright on an exam)... I will now talk about the Nut-Thins themselves.

They are very pretty.

They do NOT taste like almond, but the "rice" texture is basically similar to the crunchy puffed rice texture of those soy-rice thingys in the snack mixes with the wasabi peas and peanuts (you know what I'm talking about).

There was some form of "smoky" flavour, with a bit of umami, but the majority of the cracker tasted salty. Not potato-chip salty - not even bottom-of-the-bag-potato-chip salty. It was literally smothered in salt crystals. Initially, I was fine with it, because the smoky flavour was initially pretty prevalent (not barbecue smoky though). After a while, though, all I could taste was salt. For some reason, a lot of the gluten-free food that I buy ends up being super salty. I'll blog about these tortilla chips that are also just really salty, later, but so far, that's how it's been.

This may be because the foods that generally have the "Gluten Free" label also have a bunch of labels touting "All Natural"/other stuff that relates to not using "synthetic" ingredients (although isn't everything, in some way, synthetic/processed?). This means that they refrain from using umami flavouring, colouring, and other flavouring that is GRAS (perhaps). In this aspect, there are limited additives that the company can add to the product to make it taste great and remain fresh/not stale. So, by adding salt, a "flavouring" is added.

Soy "Steak" Style Strips

This is another review on something called "Steak Style Strips". In the package, they remind me of cooked liver, which my mum used to make with peppers (and it used to taste pretty good. Actually, animal livers are a great source of vitamin A, iron [yes!!], vitamin D, vitamin B12, and protein. Oh, and cholesterol, but I think that the other nutrients outweigh the cholesterol content). I'm not sure why I'm advertising the consumption of livers since I don't eat them myself, but these soy strips neither taste like liver nor have the nutrients that liver has.

I cooked them two ways.

1. In the pan with some spices and some ketchup. This tasted rather bland and had a seriously gluteny texture. It was a bit peppery, but it definitely did not taste like steak. The only reasons I was thinking "Hmmm, rather steaky" were that these pieces of soy actually looked like sliced steak, and they were labelled as "steak" flavoured. In other words, appearance is vital in tricking the mind into assuming things...especially when these strips are a small component of a larger meal. In my case, they weren't, but I'd imagine if they were chopped up and used in instant noodles, you couldn't tell the difference! My food tech teacher told me in year 8 that a lot of TVP is actually used in instant noodles instead of using actual chunks of cow or pig; instead, they just add a ton of flavouring to the TVP so that it tastes like animal flesh, but lasts much longer (won't expire that soon!)! Anyway, the pan version was a bit bland.

2. Microwave, with the same spices and some ketchup. These definitely tasted more salty, and since I put them in the microwave for 2:00 mins, some of the strips were pretty crispy/crunchy in that inside-out way that the microwave likes to irradiate food. In this aspect, the microwave provided more textured and flavoured [primarily salty] soy strips. The best part about the microwaved version is that the texture, although still a bit gluteny, resembles animal flesh pretty well [way better than the Smart Cutlets did].

When they say "seasoned", I believe they mean "mixed with a ton of salt and a bit of pepper".

Also, the bread was from Costco and it was the multigrain bread that comes in one loaf rather than two when you buy them. The bread is dry, rather sweet, and kind of stale. I do not have a favourable impression of it. For sliced bread, I seriously prefer the organic whole wheat bread that comes in a two-pack from Costco.

Peanut Butter Filled Pretzels.

It is terribly trying to take pictures without sunlight. In my opinion, the best light in which one should take pictures of food is definitely bright sunshine. There is no better way to highlight each crevice and every crumb.

However, sunlight rarely filters into my room since the sun sets to the left of my window and rises on the right side [I think? I really don't know, but I do know that sunlight never streams into my room].

Maybe I should clarify.

Light from the sun comes into my room through a crack called a window, but beams of beautiful, bright, sunlight does not enter my room. So, my room is always a greyish colour, unless my fluorescent light bulb...which is yellow... is on.

This is why it's terribly annoying taking pictures in my room, since I have to move the food to the edge of the table between the hours of 7am and 5pm, and usually I'm sleeping or out [I leave around 9 every day and get back from 6pm to 9pm. Nice life, I know].

So, here is a wonderful picture I took of my newest New Food:

I present you with Peanut Butter Filled Pretzels. And what a sight they are! You can see every grain of salt, every burnt corner, and even the thin layer of peanut butter enclosed by the hard, not-so-flaky pretzel!

The moral of this story is that I should take pictures of food when I get up at 8:30am in the morning and while I'm rushing around trying to leave by 8:45am so I can get to class at 9am. The second moral is that these Peanut Butter Filled Pretzels weren't desirable at all, although they look so inviting.

I eat peanut butter with pretzels all the time. So, what's the issue?

The issue is NaCl.

These pretzel pillows are so cute and enrobe a delicate, purely-saturated-peanut-flavoured [not sweet, not honey, not salty, not sesame, not fake, not waxy] chunk of peanut butter. These pretzel pillows are whole wheat. They're even coloured aesthetically!

The only problem is that they are dotted with chunks of NaCl/salt that shatter your tongue and throat the way glass decimates a piece of silk, or the way ice destroys a ship. These chunks of salt are huge! It's like having sand in a sandwich. It's unpleasant and leaves you wondering why you're stuck in a desert [metaphorically, both for the sand/wich and the pretzel pillows].

Even after scraping off salt crystals with my nails, the pretzel pillows tasted like they were smothered in salt. I sure wish they were salt-less; I would have enjoyed them so much more :(.

This may be why there is a glass of milk on the package, although I really needed to drink a LOT of water to feel as though I was at homeostasis, if at all.