My cat, the pork chop eater...

So, my cat is getting old. He no longer likes to jump and well, we used to feed him on the kitchen counter and so we'd never leave food on it. But now that he doesn't jump, I am not as quick to clean things up. About two nights ago I made pork chops on the grill and we had one small piece of one left that I just, for some reason, ignored, and left on the counter. The next morning, I walk into the kitchen and notice that (1) the cat is on the counter and (2) there is not more pork chop... So, I think well, maybe the husband threw it away... I also notice that the butter I also left out. Well, the butter seems to have an indention in it that would be the perfect fit to a cat tongue. So, I wait until the husband gets home from work to ask him if he happened to clean up the pork chop -- but no.... So it appears that fat boy had eaten a pork chop and about a tablespoon of butter... No wonder he is fat!

Eggplant Parm

Yum.

Yummy.

Yummier.

My husband hates eggplant and well, pretty much any vegetable, but the eggplants were on sale at the grocery store and they looked pretty so I bought one. And well, even if eggplant parm wasn't the healthiest thing I could have made with it, I had some free time last night and I did it anyways!

So here are pictures of my wonderful and tasty dish! Plus, I just made it up as I went along -- not that it's a really hard thing to figure out how to make though... I figured I would post this since maybe it would be a change in direction from my usual complaints about the world!

Here is a picture of me sweating out the eggplant slices. I always find this part amazing!


And this one is of the eggplants waiting to get all breaded up to get all fried up!


And here are the eggplants all breaded!


And here they are in the pan! (duh!)



And here is the finished product!



It was easy to make, yet time consuming... Here is how I made it if anyone wants to try.

1. Slice eggplant into fairly thin/uniform slices.
2. Spread them out on paper towels and sprinkle a lot of salt on them to sweat them out. This helps so that don't act like a sponge when you fry them (and I think it helps them not taste bitter too? Don't know). After a fair amount of water comes out, rinse the salt off and dry.
3. Dredge each in a beaten egg mixture and then coat in bread crumbs. Complete until ALL of the slices are done. This takes a while.
4. Heat up oil in a pan (I used some healthy something or other oil that combines canola, olive and I think something else -- apparently it is supposed to be good for you -- but with the amount of oil I ended up using, probably not!). Fry all of them up. This took me a long time as well since I could only fit about 4 slices at a time into my pan.
5. Make the sauce. Here is where I realized I had no cans of tomatoes or really any tomato product at all besides a jar of barilla marinara. Figured it was going to have to do because I wasn't about to go to the store after all of that breading/frying/slicing etc... So I took a few cloves of garlic and a little bit of onion and sauteed it in some olive oil. Then I added some wine into that and let it reduce. Then added in the ** shush ** jarred sauce and also some fresh basil and oregano from my herb garden.
6. Assemble -- put an eggplant slice in the dish, cover with a little bit of sauce. Repeat a few times until you get to the top. Cover with a little extra sauce than the previous layers. Throw on some good mozz. cheese on top and put under the broiler until it is all nice and melty and cheesy.
7. Enjoy!!!

Random Pictures

OK, so here are some random pictures....

The first are my tomato plants. Yes, I am a farmer, LOL!! The first picture are the 3 plants a few weeks ago (there are 2 that have yellow tomatoes and one roma tomato plant). The second picture are my first two tomatoes!!!





And, here is a picture from my horrible camera phone from my walk on the beach this morning:



And last but not least, here are the pictures of the horrible smoke from the wildfires that I have been bitching about for, oh, over a month now. These are pictures from a Saturday morning, in my car, on the way to the gym. The first one I took while driving on the highway and the second one is looking towards "downtown" Virginia Beach.



It was SO incredibly bad on so many days -- and most happened to be weekend days. But this was one of the worst ones that I had seen. They say it'll probably stick around here and there for the rest of the summer unless a tropical storm or hurricane happen to go by it. I do not know which will be worse!