Baked Eggplant Parmesan – Meatless Monday

Last week was my family’s 4th week of Meatless Mondays and in the spirit of being completely honest with our experience, it wasn’t an easy week. I had planned on making this Healthy Baked Eggplant Parmesan from Andie Mitchelle’s site. For a variety of reasons, I ended up having a cheese & avocado sandwich. Points for still having a “meatless” meal, even though it wasn’t at all the eggplant parmesan I had planned.

The day started off just fine and I had already purchased all the ingredients for the eggplant recipe. Things started to get a little wonky about mid-afternoons and before I even knew what hit us, it was 8pm and I had not even started prepping dinner. The kids had already eaten and were in bed and I looked at the eggplant parmesan recipe and saw that you had to let the eggplant sit for 45 minutes before cooking it (so the salt could pull out the excess water) and at that point I just gave up.

However, I new I still wanted to make the eggplant parmesan because I’ve been on an eggplant kick lately and I love eggplant parmesan! Eggplant Parmesan is typically a heavier dish because the eggplant is fried and then baked with about 2 pounds of cheese on top. Delicious, but not terribly waistline friendly. The Healthy Baked Eggplant Parmesan recipe didn’t call for frying anything, used a lot less cheese and used panko style breadcrumbs. It looked amazing and sounded much lighter.

So, even though I made this dish the following night for dinner, I’m still sharing it as my weekly “meatless monday” dish, because stuff happens. And “meatless tuesday” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Besides, it was FANTASTIC and deserves to be shared.

Recipe Review ~

I give this dish a 9 out of 10. If you like Eggplant Parmesan, this dish is for you! It’s light but is still so delicious and fresh tasting. I will definitely be making this again (and again and again), the hubby loved it also and he doesn’t even care for eggplant parmesan. I think the only reason I didn’t give it a perfect score is because it’s a bit time consuming, so it’s not something you can just whip up. Once the eggplant sits with the salt on it though, it’s easy to pull the dish together from there and becomes a quick recipe.

Nutrition Review ~

You can read the nutritional benefits of eggplant in this previous Grilled Eggplant post from last week.

The main reason I chose to try this dish is because it’s baked instead of fried. It’s also one of the only eggplant parmesan recipes I’ve seen that doesn’t use a ton of cheese. By simply adding a little bit of fresh mozzarella on top of each eggplant round and then browning it in the oven, you are ensuring you get a nice gooey bite of cheese with each piece of eggplant but aren’t drowning your meal in cheese. This means way less calories and fat without the loss of flavor or taste.

Using panko for the breadcrumbs give the dish a nice crunch without making it feel heavy from the breading. My favorite part of the recipe was that you just coat one side of the eggplant slices with breadcrumb instead of both. This cuts the calories down but you don’t even realize it’s less breading. You get a perfect crunch with each bite!

The dish itself is low on lean protein and lacking greens, so I served ours with a huge spinach salad. I included roasted sunflower seeds, black beans, and lentils in the salad to make it a complete meal.

Budget Review ~

Overall, I would rate this dish really budget friendly. Since I already had many of the ingredients, it was really inexpensive to make. Even if you didn’t have all those pantry items on hand, it wouldn’t be very pricey to make this dish. 1 eggplant makes about 12 slices and I’d say one person could eat about 4 slices. So this recipe makes about 3 servings. In total, this dish costed me $6 to make, making it only $2 per serving! I rounded up some costs, but in general this is how I tallied up the cost to me personally:

$1.99 eggplant

$2 tomato sauce

$2 fresh mozzarella cheese

Already had on hand: Egg, Fresh Basil, Dried Herbs, Panko Breadcrumbs

This dish has become one of my favorite, I’ve already make it two days in a row!

Link to the Healthy Baked Eggplant Parmesan recipe here

View our previous Meatless Monday recipes here: One Pan Gnocchi Skillet , Spicy Thai Noodles and Grilled Eggplant with Fresh Tomato Salad. 

You can also check out our Meatless Monday Pinterest Board for even more inspiration on vegetarian inspired dishes.