Eggplant, hold the Parmesan.

After my doctor appointments, I went to Sunflower Market to pick up a few things. It is really, really, really frustrating to shop with my restrictions, but adding sugar to the "no" list makes it even more damn frustrating. Even the  "healthy" stuff has cane sugar, evaporated cane sugar, rice syrup, and so on. In the chicken breakfast sausages. In the protein powder. In the yogurt. The coconut milk yogurt. Even plain. In everything.

I'm not sure what to do about the yogurt since that used to be my natural cure for what ails me. The other option is cranberry juice, and let's face it, that is nasty without sweetener.

I found a replacement protein powder, actually the same brand but plain instead of vanilla or chocolate. All the other powders have soy or whey (milk) or splenda; even the hemp powder has cane sugar.

Would be better with cheese....and if I let it finish baking

My eggplant needed to be cooked since I took it off the plant the other day, so that was my mission tonight. Unfortunately, it took forever so I will be eating it another night, but I had some before it really had time to bake off and it was very good. I took instructions but had to make too many modifications to say I used someone else's recipe!

Preheat oven to 350. Slice the eggplant using a mandolin for thinnish uniform slices. Lightly salt and let sit while preparing breading. For breading, put 1 cup of unblanched almond flour in a shallow dish. Add generous amount of Italian seasoning (I think it was probably a tablespoon or more) and garlic powder (probably a teaspoon or two). Mix--I do this with my hands to make sure it's not lumpy.


Rinse the eggplant. (You can leave in a bowl of water, but I didn't.) Using the two-hand method, use one hand to put wet eggplant slices, one at a time, into the breading and use other hand to cover with breading. Shake off and put on cookie sheet. When all slices are breaded, put in oven to bake. The instructions said 5 minutes on each side. Maybe it's my oven, but I did 10 minutes on each side. Then layer in a casserole dish with marinara sauce and bake for at least a half hour.

My husband probably won't even try it but he did want to know what was going on because it smelled good. I would recommend peeling the eggplant, although I forgot. And if you can have cheese, by all means, don't effin tell me.