Anyone know a good low-fat eggplant recipe?

I can’t deliver an exact recipe, but my son often cooks a vegan dish that involves cubed eggplant along with tofu, chopped bell peppers in two or three colors, (canned) diced tomatoes, ?onion, and fresh (not salted) cashews. He browns small rectangles of tofu in a little oil and some garlic (he uses a lot of garlic) and then kind of stews everything together for a while in a large skillet. I think he also purees the cashews to thicken the sauce. He serves it with rice. You might try searching on those ingredients.

http://www.greek-salad-recipes.com/melitzanosalata-greek-eggplant-salad/, nice one, believe me!

This is what I did for the vegan customers we had this summer.. the way they raved about it, you’d think I spent hours slaving over this dish..

- Take your eggplant, cut into slices (about an inch thickness).
– Take a fork and score the flesh on both sides of each slice.
– You want a low, long horizontal container (such as a baking dish, or piece of tupperware is better because you can close and agitate marinade)
– Lay a few slices in the bottom of the container.
– Sprinkle sea salt and black pepper over the eggplant flesh
– Pour olive oil & balsamic vinegar over eggplant, enough to coat
– Repeat with remaining eggplant, working in layers
(depending on how much eggplant is in the container, you can aim for about ¼ cup of both olive oil and balsamic vinegar)
– Agitate eggplant/marinade so that all of the eggplant is coated
– Let sit and marinade for at least half an hour, agitate as desired
– Grill it!

I loooove eggplant marinara sauce over pasta. I don’t know if that’s as low-calorie as you were thinking, but it’s delicious! I’ve never made it myself, but here’s a recipe I found:

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=10000000630052

Ratatouille, one of my favorites.

I use it as a base for a ratatouille tart. Brown it quickly in a pan in hot oil then put it in the bottom of a baking dish. Then in the same pan I browned the eggplant I brown onions, a little garlic and I like a chopped chili too. While that is browning and to save baking time I put some sweet potato, carrots, basically whatever is in the fridge and nuke it until it is tender, then put the whole lot in the baking dish add a can of diced tomatoes, some salt pepper, a hit of balsamic vinegar some capers and black olives. Let your imagination go, then I put a frozen pie crust thing on top and bake it until it’s golden brown (as the commercials say). Sometimes I will put a bit of cheese on top but that makes it more fattening. If you want it to be really local, skip the pastry on top.

hehehe, I see @marinelife just beat me to it!

@xxii No fear – calories are fine, it’s just fat that I can’t have. Thanks so much!

@Jeruba Do you know if the tomatoes are drained or not before adding them?

@MissAnthrope That. Sounds. Awesome.

@Seek_Kolinahr, if you’re interested, I’ll e-mail him for the recipe right now. I think the liquid from the tomatoes is part of what all the rest stews in. But stand by.

I’d love that, thanks!

Another thing you can do is make a caponata, which seems to be pretty popular. I don’t like it, myself, but I don’t really count because I can’t stand vinegar. There seem to be different recipes and ways to make it, here are a couple.

Bruschetta with caponata
Caponata

Ooh, I love vinegar.

@MissAnthrope – that sounded great until I reached the raisin part!

@rooeytoo – You could omit the raisins, or try the second recipe (which sounds like the version I’ve seen served). Not a big raisin fan, myself.

@MissAnthrope – thanks I must admit I didn’t look at the 2nd one but now I did and that one sounds really good. I will try it. Thanks for sharing and GQ & GA

@Seek_Kolinahr – jeez I better start reading the whole question, I just noticed you said no bread so I guess that means you could skip the pastry in my suggestion and eat it on pasta instead!

<Waiting for son’s reply to my message.>

Slice it up, put some olive oil on it with some salt and pepper and cook it on the grill, delicious!

@Seek_Kolinahr, my son and I are going back and forth about which recipe I mean. In the meantime, he offers this recommended link:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/series/recipes_for_health/eggplant/index.html
He describes these recipes as “generally either veg(etari)an or easily adapted to be.”