Fried Green Eggplant

As we may have mentioned a few times, the ES crew spent the past week at a beach house in the Outer Banks with 16 or so of our closest friends. 80 proof, gansie and I drove down together because we’re the coolest because no one wanted to hear us rattle on about our blog for 7 hours. And look! We even passed this swimming pool store that makes a pun on our blog name – I had no idea we were so big in the Carolinas.

In addition to such stressful tasks as foosball, lying on the beach, and mixing drinks, we obviously spent plenty of time talking about food and cooking. We have a whole backlog of stories to share, so I thought I would get the ball rolling with this outstanding recipe from our good deep-fried southern friend Thresher. He took the philosophy behind fried green tomatoes and cooked up some eggplant that is deliciously unhealthy enough to make Paula Deen go veggie. Recipe after the jump. FullDis – I guesstimated the measurements after watching Thresher cook it up.

Fried Green Eggplant

Slice the eggplant lengthwise, into very thin strips. Keep the smallest strips, the ones from the ends, whole, and cut the longer ones in half – so one average e-plant will give you about 10 strips, three inches long and just a sliver thick.

Mix two cups of buttermilk with two eggs. In a separate bowl, mix a few cups of cornmeal with some salt and pepper.

Double-dip each eggplant slice in the buttermilk and the cornmeal – butter, then cornmeal, butter again, cornmeal again.

Heat a whole bunch of oil in a frying pan and wait for it to get super-hot. You should have enough oil that you can place the slices in so that they are completely submerged in oil. Essentially, deep-frying without a deep fryer.

Fry each slice for just about a minute on each side, until they get browned and crispy – don’t worry about cooking the eggplant enough – with this much hott oil, it gets tender almost instantly.

Remove the eggplant, and pat down with a paper towel, if you’d rather not consume an entire barrel of oil.

Just a few minutes and one grease fire later, we had an amazing veggie centerpiece for our meal.

Thanks, Thresher – did I miss anything?

UPDATE: Duh. Here’s a picture.