KITCHEN BITCH: Eggplant Without The ‘Yuck Face’

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kitchen-bitch2.thumbnail.jpgBY MAVIS LINNEMANN One of my new favorite magazines is Cooking Light, because it offers foodies like me ways to cut calories and fat in all my favorite dishes. There’s even a way to make donuts more healthful! (Keep that oil at 375?F to keep your donuts from getting greasy.) I spied a Parmesan and Eggplant Souffle recipe in CL’s June 2010 issue, but it seemed a little off. I’ve spent a lot of time with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and, if you know anything about French cooking, you know that the French really know how to make soufflés, and pretty much anything else with eggs. Julia Child gives precise direction on how to make soufflé in her book, and the soufflé from Cooking Light just didn’t seem to have that soufflé magic I was looking for. So, in my quest to count calories but eat the yummiest possible meal, I combined the two recipes. I kept the vegetables and low-fat milk from Cooking Light, and added a few extra eggs and some butter from Julia Child’s recipe. More than the ingredients it’s my method that most resembles Julia’s. Cooking Light’s recipe calls for simply whipping the egg whites with a whisk, but I think of a soufflé as a dramatic, elegant, over-the-top egg puff. To get that dramatic height, the egg whites have to be whipped into beautiful stiff peaks and gently folded into the béchamel sauce and vegetables as Julia called for. MORE

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