Eggplant Rollatini

The eggplant are coming in fast, and we're trying to get creative with our cooking to keep from growing bored. I recently had a delicious dish at a Greek-style restaurant called eggplant rollatini, so we tried our hand last night at recreating it. Spoiler - it turned out fantastic!



Ingredients (serves 2-3)

Two long Japanese eggplant or one big fat American eggplant (as our Indian friend calls them)
1/2 sleeve of finely crushed saltines plus a little extra salt
2 well-beaten eggs
Olive oil
1/4 carton ricotta + 1 egg + salt and pepper

We only grew Japanese eggplant this year, which look like this. You can also use regular purple eggplant if you can't find japanese. Your pinwheels will just be bigger!



Slice the eggplant length-wise as thin as you can get them. You are going to be rolling them up into little pinwheels, so they need to be thin.



Ian is a magician with that knife! No need to remove the skin or soak them in salt like you may have been taught in the past.



Dip each eggplant slice into the beaten egg, making sure to cover the entire slice, even the sides.



Roll the slice in the cracker crumbs. Make sure you get it covered all over.



Carefully lay each slice in hot olive oil, allowing each side to get nice and crispy. The oil needs to be good and hot at this point so you get a lovely golden finish to the breading.



Mix together the ricotta, egg, salt and pepper.



Spread a thin layer of the mixture on one side of each slice of fried eggplant. Don't get overzealous with the amount of ricotta you spread on each slice - a little goes a long way.



Starting from one end, roll the slice up into a tidy little pinwheel.



Place all pinwheels in a lightly greased baking dish.



Cover with your favorite pasta sauce, mozarella cheese and some fresh tomatoes if you've got them.



Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.



Serve over pasta, and with some sweet corn. So yummy! Prep time was about 40 minutes, with 25 additional minutes for baking.