#26 Eggplant Parmesan

26 menu items down on my road to eat the whole Tat's menu. Damn. After about ten items on the menu I started getting forgetful about what I had and hadn't eaten, so I printed out a menu and stuck it up on my wall at work. I've been crossing off items as I go.

So technically I'm halfway there, but in reality a lot of what I have on my list are salads and sides. I can knock out about 10 of these in 3 meals. It also means a lot of what I have left are sandwiches I've put off eating because they hold no appeal for me. When life hands you lemons, right?

Who coined that bullshit? What a terrible fucking metaphor. Lemons are awesome. You know what's not awesome? Eggplant. It looks like what happens when you OD on Cialis and have an erection that lasts 24 hours... and it tastes like dirt.

When life hands you eggplant, make eggplant parm.

Yeah, that's the worst joke anyone's ever made on dot blogspot dot com, but the metaphor is apt. Eggplant is shit. Eggplant parm, at least done up Tat's way, is entirely edible.

The eggplant is my friend Lauren's go-to sandwich, because she's veg. I'm not afflicted with that particular moral dilemma, so I'd under no circumstances have ordered this sandwich except to get through E.A.T. even thought she swears it's damned good. And she's half-right, if you've got even an inkling of affection for eggplant then this is all you. Somebody got a little zealous with the broiler on mine and it came out half burnt and with 75% of the cheese stuck to the paper rather than IN the sandwich. C'est la vie, as the Philadelphians say.

The menu says "Lightly fried, topped with Tat's Marinara sauce & broiled w/ Mozzarella & Parmesan cheese." The eggplant is sliced thin, breaded, and fried. You get a stack of these eggplant slices with a bit of the house red sauce, which is mild and sweet. The cheese all blends together, and it could use a lot more parmesan to combat the blandness of the mozzarella, but in spite of that the toasted bread and the sweet sauce play off the eggplant nicely.

At some point I've still got to eat the Roast Veggie, which along with the BLT and the Eggplant are my Tat's trifecta of "don't want to fucking eat it."

Why am I doing this, again?