Summertime Eggplant Pizza

This Eggplant Parm Pizza makes a wonderful meal, snack, or appetizer! Everybody loves it, and you can easily pack it for a family outing! Tastes great warm or cold!

Eggplant Parmesan Pizza

Prepare fresh-you Easy Eggplant Parm. Then, use prepared whole wheat pizza crust, such as Mama Mary's, Trader Joe's, or Boboli. OR make Basil Pizza Dough! (coming soon in another post)

Once you've cooked your eggplant for 45 min to an hour, remove from oven and cover pizza dough with eggplant, about 2-3 slices thick of eggplant. Use about half the pan off eggplant per pizza pie.

Follow baking instructions. OR for homemade dough, bake at 375 for 20 minutes. Basil dough recipe will make two pizzas.

Enjoy immediately hot, and leftovers cold!

The pizza dough replaces the pasta.

What a great meatless meal!

We love pizza!

Guacamole Pizza

Barbecue Pizza

Artichoke Pizza (coming soon)

Pesto Pizza

3 Awesome Reasons to Eat Eggplant!

There are a million reasons to eat eggplant, starting with taste! I just love the texture; I love chomping into a nice piece of eggplant! It’s a veggie, AND it’s hearty! It is also abundant in many vitamins and minerals (such as most of the B-vitamins -- did you know there are 8 different B vitamins?, and iron and zinc), and soluble fiber, and like most veggies it’s practically calorie-free! Soluble fiber is the type that helps lower cholesterol. Fiber is great for a million reasons too, but we’ll save that for another post!  Try Easy Eggplant Parmesan!

Ok, so here are today’s awesome reasons to eat eggplant!

1) If you know of anyone who has a cancer tumor (though I really hope you don’t!), you might find it cool that a component of eggplant has a way to prevent tumor growth! Anthocyanins, a type of phytochemical found in blue and purple fruits and vegetables, does this by preventing new blood vessels from forming which would feed the tumor.

2) Have a cold? Eggplant has antiviral properties, so they may help you get rid of that nasty cold or flu that you have been trying to ditch! It’s because of chlorogenic acid found in eggplant, and this substance may also help prevent diabetes.

3) Hopefully, you are healthy as can be! Even the healthiest people in the world have free-radical damage; after all, it happens primarily as we burn calories each day (other causes)! So, the fact that eggplant is a great source of antioxidants is major health benefit which helps protect us from free radicals -- which are a cause of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and aging!

I love the way Hari Sharma explains the following: “Diabetes, kidney problems, liver problems, almost every disease is related to the damage caused by these free radicals. If we remove the damage we are causing ourselves, all these diseases can be prevented.” He also wrote an inclusive list of many causes of free-radicals, such as stress, cholesterol, meat, fat, alcohol, and smoking, in the same article.

Now, do you wonder how you can eat some eggplant?  Try this EASY EGGPLANT PARM recipe!

TELL ME IN A COMMENT: How do you like your eggplant? Grilled? Fried? Boiled? Baked?

EASY Eggplant Parm

Eggplant Parmesan is traditionally a somewhat labor-intensive meal to prepare, as each piece of eggplant must be breaded and fried. THAT ALL CHANGES HERE!

Now eggplant parm can be nearly as easy as boiling a pot of pasta and opening a jar of sauce! By the way, I also recommend doing this, since this dish is delicious atop plain pasta, and sauce will be used for the eggplant.

Check out some pasta recommendations!
Barilla Plus is great!

EASY Eggplant Parm Ingredients:

1-2 eggplants
1/2 c ground flaxseed
1/2 c chia seed
1/2 c nutritional yeast (great substitute for Parmesan cheese)
1 jar spaghetti sauce
1 box whole wheat pasta

Toughest part comes first - cutting the eggplant - seriously, this is the hardest work you'll do! Cut the eggplant as paper-thin as you can. I think THIS is the secret to the recipe!

Do you love my eggplant piles?

Next, lay your slices on a glass pan, overlapping slightly. Salt. Repeat a second layer. Salt.

Now, just pour flax "eggs" (combine 3 Tbsp with 1/2 c + 1 Tbsp warm water) over the eggplant, followed by a generous amount of ground flax, chia, and nutritional yeast!

I've been coming up with quantities for my recipes because I think people fear messing up a meal, but I assure you I've made my recipes many, many times, with very few measuring cups, and it's pretty hard to mess them up. If you've got SOME TASTY INGREDIENTS, you can hardly go wrong! If you can get comfortable with this method of cooking, you'll SAVE TIME by skipping the measuring, and end up with fewer cups, spoons, and bowls to clean!

The more generous you are with the FLAX, CHIA, and nutritional yeast, the more nutrient packed and healthier the dish will be.
EXPERIMENT!






Have you or any guys you know ever used a strap wrench? It's plumbing tool, very HANDY in the kitchen! Different sizes help open different size jars in a flash!




Wonder about jarred spaghetti sauce?

Lastly, pour a jar of spaghetti sauce over everything. You can give the pan a shake to be sure it's all sort of even.

Now, bake at 375 degrees or so. The temperature doesn't matter too much. Here is a great benefit of vegetarian cooking: NO need to worry about cooking "enough"! 30-40 minutes should be good.

The longer the better as tomato sauce gets richer and richer as it cooks.  Wonder why eggplant is so good for you?

No final product photos to share -- everyone wanted to it up too fast to worry about pics! Hope you enjoy as much as we do! Anna even takes this to school for lunch and eats it cold!

Instead of topping pasta, you can use it as a pizza topping!  YUM! Easy Eggplant Parmesan

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK: What is your favorite ethnic cuisine? I majorly love Italian (of course!), Indian, AND Mexican!