Eggplant Parmesan and Pesto Bowties

Even though most people think I can only make desserts, I like to think that I'm pretty good at cooking meals, too. For dinner tonight, Mike and I made eggplant Parmesan and some spinach pesto. We had a nice chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano leftover from Fromagination and we figured we should use it up before it dried out. I think we did a pretty good job. We have a little bit of the cheese left over and a huge piece of rind. The rind will be great in some soup though!


The recipe I used for the eggplant Parmesan is here - I cut the recipe in half and left out the capers. Even after I cut the recipe in half, it still made a lot of food! It's supposedly four servings... but in my opinion it was more like eight. If you make the full recipe, you will need a pan much larger than your normal 9 x 13 Pyrex. I used that for my halved recipe and it was packed full to the top.


Spinach Pesto Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 cup of fresh spinach leaves, stems off
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 5 tablespoons walnuts
• 6 tablespoons olive oil
• Salt and black pepper
  
• 1/2 cup of Parmesan

Directions

• In a food processor, blend together the spinach, garlic, walnuts and olive oil. Add salt and black pepper to taste.
  
• Stir in the Parmesan.
  

I served the pesto with bow tie pasta. The pesto recipe makes enough to coat a pound of pasta.





The meal took 3 hours to make and 3 minutes to devour :)