thebigfatnoodle

No Fish Friday today: today we’re Fridge Raiders…

Standard · Posted by bigmonster77uk on October 14, 2011 · 6 Comments 

Because I work from home, I get called on to get creative in the kitchen a lot more than your average man about the house. I don’t mind at all, as I’ve always loved cooking. To me, it’s one of the fundamentals in life that help ease you through the day, making something wholesome and delicious that keep you and your loved ones satisfied and happy until the next mealtime. It helps lower the stresses of a busy day, be it basic chopping, hob cooking or even advanced wine tasting… until, that is, you have an empty fridge, and 30 minutes to come up with something tasty, and you didn’t have time to go to the supermarket during the day.

Still edible? We

Fridge raiding is not just the preserve of students: grown-ups do it too.

Today we had a great deal of ‘elder’ vegetables, including a couple of softer peppers, one red, one yellow, 3 midget courgettes, 4 moist mushrooms, a decent onion, a mature week-old bolognese sauce, some forgotten crusty cheese-ends (4 varieties), a dollop of home made ketchup and some of the tomato margherita sauce we use for lazy pizzas and the like…

Purple Eggplants

…and then there were two Aubergines – Eggplants to a lot of you. Now the thing with eggplants is you really have to commit a dish to them as, with the exception of the mini versions that you get in Thailand and South East Asia, they don’t come particularly small. Consequently they pretty much become the feature of your recipe, which is one reason they are a real love it or hate it vegetable. I didn’t really like them at all, until I remembered the stuffed Eggplant recipe from the Atkins Diet.

Now most people will have tried one diet or another, and a popular one from a few years back was the Atkins diet (or Fatkins diet as we called it), which removed all Carbs from your diet, and made your breath smell like turpentine after a few weeks. Suffice to say, we weren’t big fans…

One of the recipes was a stuffed and oven baked eggplant/ground mince idea, using the bulk of the eggplant to replace pasta for your main meal of the day. It sounded pretty grim, but tasted pretty good: I guess when you’re on a diet and hungry you will give anything a go.

However, here I have adapted the original recipe, but the important thing here is just to be confident to use any leftovers you have to hand. With a little love, care and carefully applied baking heat, it WILL work out…

The recipe is here