Fried Baby Eggplant with Pasta and Giardiniera is a great meatless dinner. I love ordering Eggplant Parmesan when eating out at an Italian Restaurant. So I came up with a fast and easy version I could make at home after a long day at work. This Fried Baby Eggplant with Pasta tastes fabulous and can be put this together in less than 30 minutes from start to finish.
I love the way eggplant looks, and baby eggplants are soooo cute.
For the sauce I used my Fresh Spicy Marinara Sauce. You can see the recipe for this on my blog, cookingitcute.com. I had canned a few bottles of the Fresh Spicy Marinara Sauce the last time I made it to use on nights like this when I don’t have time to make a red sauce.
My sister had given me a bottle of Giardiniera she had made, I used that as a garnish. Giardiniera (spicy pickled vegetables) is a big thing here in Chicago, we will put it on almost anything. I will post a recipe for that soon. Let’s get started. This recipe will feed four people.
You will need the following ingredients:
- 4 baby eggplants, sliced into 1/4 inch disks
- 4 tablespoons of olive oil
- 1/2 cup of all purpose flour
- salt to taste
- pepper to taste
- 2 eggs
- Spicy Marinara Sauce (any red sauce you like)
- spaghetti cooked per package instructions
- Giardiniera
Start cooking the spaghetti. In a separate pot start heating up the Spicy Marinara Sauce. In a large frying pan heat two tablespoons of olive oil on medium high heat.
Beat the eggs in a shallow bowl and set aside. Mix flour, salt and pepper in a second shallow bowl.
Once olive oil is hot, take baby eggplant disks one at a time and coat first with egg than with the flour mixture. Place breaded eggplant in hot oil. Repeat until the frying pan has a layer of frying eggplant disks. You will probably need to do this in two batches. Add additional olive oil between batches if needed. These will cook rather quickly depending on how thin your slices are, watch so that they do not burn.
Cook on one one side for about three minutes until you have a nice brown coat. Turn breaded eggplant over and continue frying until done. Meanwhile, your pasta should be cooked and drained and the marinara sauce should be hot.
Once eggplant is finished, plate up and enjoy. I did!
