Eggplant Croquettes

Eggplant Croquettes:

Last night I made the most delicious meal from eggplant ever! Usually, I make eggplant parmesan because I had yet to find a good recipe using eggplant in a different way. I googled eggplant recipes and found a great one on allrecipes.com (see the end of the post for the official recipe). You can see in the photograph the ingredients required to prepare the eggplant croquettes. The eggplant in the middle is a Japanese Eggplant, which was picked from our garden. Because it wouldn't be quite enough for the recipe, we bought a different kind of eggplant at the grocery store. That one is a classic eggplant with the pear shape, deep royal purple color. 

Ingredients for eggplant croquettes

The recipe does not call for this, but I always salt out eggplant slices before cooking to remove any bitterness from the fruit (NB: we should have peeled the eggplants first before salting because I had to peel after slicing and that took some additional time).

Salting slices 

Cooking and mashing

A special thanks to Nate for helping me with the dicing of onions and eggplant and for cooking the eggplant! After the eggplant was salted, I rinsed the slices well in water to remove the excess salt. Nate cubed the eggplant (after I removed the peel) and microwaved for a couple minutes to cook. He then mashed the eggplant - they will still have shape, not mashed like you would imagine mashed potatoes.

Everything gets mixed together: 1 cup cheese, 2 slightly beaten eggs, cooked eggplant, 1/4 chopped onion, 1 cup Italian style breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons parsley (I eyeballed this), 3 cloves of garlic (we LOVE garlic), salt and pepper.

Mixing croquette "batter"

After mixing the "batter" I formed six patties and placed them on a slightly greased pan (PAM). I then coated each eggplant croquette with a little bit of olive oil and baked for 20 minutes total in the oven (350 degrees). I decided not to pan fry them after reading a couple of reviews from the original recipe. After 10 minutes, I flipped the croquettes and baked for the remaining 10 minutes.

Forming eggplant croquettes

All six croquettes before baking

The photographs above show me making the eggplant croquettes and placing the six into a greased pan.

Baked croquettes!

First delicious bite

We ate these for dinner last night with a side of pasta and tomato sauce; oh my goodness! I have never had eggplant that tasted SO good before! And, I really like eggplant. It almost reminded me of having a hamburger, but a delicious eggplant/vegetarian one. I bet the croquettes would be good with additional onion (1/4 of an onion is not very much). Bon appetit!


Online Recipe:
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/eggplant-croquettes/