Toddler-Friendly Eggplant Parmesan Meatballs

Vegetarian-friendly and carnivore-approved! When I took the meatballs out of the oven, my husband (raging carnivore) promptly ran over, popped one in his mouth and said "Why does it taste like there's meat in these?"  My toddler devoured these meatballs and I hope your family approves!  Feel free to modify for those with allergies.

Ingredients:

1 large eggplant or 2 medium size - skin on, diced into 1 inch cubes

4 cloves of garlic

1/4 cup fresh basil

3 cups whole wheat breadcrumbs

Dried Italian seasoning

Olive oil

2 large eggs

1/4 cup Pecorino Romano cheese - grated

4 tbsp grated Parmesan

1 -2 jars of tomato basil pasta sauce

Cooking spray

Salt and pepper


Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Using a very sharp knife, cut eggplant lengthwise and dice into 1 inch pieces

While you're working on the eggplant, get a large skillet warmed up on medium high heat and 1 tsp of olive oil

Once the pan and oil are nice and warm, slide in that eggplant off your chopping board

Add about 1/2 cup of water, season well with salt and pepper, and let the eggplant soften and cook for around 12-15 mins.




While your eggplant cooks (don't forget to stir every once in a while), prepare the rest of your ingredients.

Add your cheeses, your basil, your whole cloves of garlic to a food processor/chopper.   I love my Hamilton Beach chopper and use it ALL the time.  Here is a link to the one I use:

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Tip: If you're like me and are a major cheese snob and are a bit thrifty, you probably buy your cheese in hard blocks and not already grated.  This is excellent because with a hard core chopper, you can just cut the cheese (heehee) into large cubes and throw it into your chopper with the rest of your ingredients and it will shred the cheese for you.  I personally HATE grating cheese.  HATE it so hard.  Don't press pulse or puree or chop yet.  Resist the urge until your eggplant is cooked!!  You can use this 2 seconds of free time to check on your toddler who is probably now drinking out of the dog bowl.

In a large mixing bowl, add your bread crumbs and mix in your 2 tsp of dried Italian seasoning. Voila!  Whole wheat Italian-seasoned bread crumbs!

Beat your eggs in a separate small bowl and incorporate into your breadcrumb mixture.

By this point, your eggplant should look like the one in the picture on the top right and if so, it is time to hit the puree button on the chopper.  Carefully add the eggplant to your chopper and hit that glorious chop/puree/do all my hard work for me button.  DO NOT put that large skillet you used to cook the eggplant in the sink, you will need it later!

After a quick pulse, your ingredients should look something like this:

Pour that delicious eggplant batter (OK, that doesn't sound delicious) into your bread crumb and egg mixture. Add a bit more salt if desired.  I desire lots of salt, which is bad.  If you're dainty, you may prefer to spend an hour mixing everything in with a wooden spoon.  I use my hands because it's a zillion times faster and I kinda like the feel of squishing stuff.  I guess I'm a toddler too :)

Once your mixture is incorporated really well (don't forget the pesky chunks of breadcrumbs that like to stick to the bottom of the bowl) it shouldn't feel watery at all and should be a pretty dry consistency.

Line a baking sheet with some foil and spray the heck out of that thing with olive oil spray.   Roll the mixture into golf ball size meatballs and place on the baking sheet. You can whistle while you work, or watch old shows on Netflix that take you 30,000 times longer to finish because you have kids.   Depending on the size of your eggplant, you may get anywhere from 22-28 meatballs.

Spray the tops with some more olive oil spray and pop them into the oven for 25 minutes.

When you have around 5 mins left on the oven timer, prep the sauce

Remember that skillet I told you not to put in the sink? Well you need it now.  Open up a jar of whoop- I mean, pasta sauce and pour it all into the skillet.  Warm up that sauce good but not too good that you get splatters of pasta sauce all over your apron and scare your children.  Not speaking from experience here or anything.

When you hear that annoyingly loud BEEEEEEP from the oven, remove the meatballs and CAREFULLY pick up each one and place it into the simmering pasta sauce.  Simmer the meatballs for around 10 mins on low heat uncovered.

Coat them well with the sauce, you want that sauce ALL over those bad boys.  The meatballs should be quite firm but you don't want to risk breaking them, so just use a flat spatula to turn them carefully in the pan.

Chiffonade some basil (fancy term for chopping basil) and top it over the dish so it looks nice for 2.3 seconds before your family mixes it all up.

For those of you super Paleo cavemen people, you may be OK just eating these meatballs plain with a little sauce and maybe some of those zucchini noodles.  In our house, we eat pasta.  We like pasta on top of more pasta.  I usually make whole wheat pasta noodles so you can boil those up really quickly. You may need to add some more sauce if you're going to serve these with pasta which is why my ingredients list 1-2 jars of pasta sauce.  Pour some sauce over the pasta and top with 3 meatballs, a little basil and serve.