The kiddo and I have been watching Chopped Junior on the Food Network lately. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s a cooking show that starts with 4 young competitors age range of about 8-13. They get a basket of 4 random and usually bizarre ingredients, and have to put together an appetizer. One kid then gets chopped.
The three remaining competitors move onto the entree round, then final 2 move on to the dessert round before the Chopped Junior Chef is granted $10,000 and a Chef jacket.
All of their meals look amazing, creative, and delicious.
I would hope that I could be on their cooking level, but that would be far from the truth. What can I say, we got inspired by watching a kids cooking show.
This week we picked up an eggplant at Aldi, (I love Aldi) and the kiddo was a bit hesitant as she didn’t like it much the last time she tried it about a year ago. So we went with a Chopped Junior episode vibe while creating our version of Eggplant pizza. I figured pizza would at least be a fun (and easy) opening to giving this healthy food another try.
Here’s how we did it.
Ingredients:
- One eggplant
- Olive oil
- Minced garlic
- Salt and pepper
- Pizza toppings- we used chopped mushrooms, chopped peppers,chopped onions. Spinach would’ve been good too, but didn’t have it in the fridge
- Spaghetti sauce
- Grated cheese
- Parmesan cheese
1. Pre-heat oven to 425. Get a baking sheet with parchment paper on top.
2. Slice eggplant length-wise or around the middle. We went with circle shapes instead of ovals.
3. Mix olive oil and minced garlic in a small bowl, then brush both sides of each slice of eggplant and place on parchment paper baking sheet. Lightly sprinkle salt and pepper.
4. Put eggplant in oven for 7-10 minutes.
5. While eggplant baking, sautee pizza toppings of onion, mushrooms, and peppers in a small skillet. I used a separate small pot to heat up about a cup of spaghetti sauce.
6. Take out eggplant when done, and quickly spoon and spread some spaghetti sauce on each eggplant slice. Spoon some sauteed veggies on each slice.
7. Sprinkle cheese on each slice. Since we were ran out of cheese, we also sprinkled grated Parmesan cheese on top, just to make sure we were covered in the cheese department!
8. Put the eggplant back in the oven for 5 minutes.
9. Enjoy an easy and healthy home cooked meal, while your kid tells you that your meal is totally worth the $10,000 prize money.
