Test Kitchen: Eggplant Parmesan

Jay Patruno, Junior Student in Dietetics, SAR ’18

Are you ready?
Is there a change in your life you feel ambivalent about?
Well let’s evaluate your need, commitment, and environmental and self-awareness shall we?

This is how Sargent Choice Test Kitchen #2 started off with. Sigal Vax, MScOT, presented to our group about the Readiness for Rehabilitation Model. This is an Occupational Therapy (OT) tool for facilitating engagement developed here at BU through the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation and utilized at Ono Academic College in Israel. Sigal has used this on patients, her children after they relocated to America, and now on us Test Kitchen attendees, and it was an amazing way of framing our thinking about change, especially during such a stressful, transitional time of the year.

Thinking critically like this and introspecting opens the forum for good conversation. Chatting over a home-cooked meal is such a lost artifact of socializing. If more people sat down and ate together, played games, and talked about their lives I truly believe many problems we all suffer with could be solved. Well, we here at the Sargent Choice Test Kitchen do just that and the environment is welcoming for all you who haven’t stopped in yet.

If we dive into this Eggplant Parmesan recipe, one thing we realized is that you need to cut your eggplant evenly! Pieces of eggplant that are thin, thick, curvy, chunked, etc. don’t allow them all to cook evenly. You get very tender pieces and very not-so-tender pieces. It’s really all a preference of palate, really. And for any eggplant critics this recipe would work just as well with other vegetables like eggplant such as summer squash or zucchini.

The best part of the night (aside from playing Bananagrams with other attendees – and winning!) was when the oven opened and the entire room filled with familiar scents of Italian cuisine. Everyone’s faces lit up and mouths started salivating. Even those who were skeptical on eggplant couldn’t resist at least trying a bite because of how amazing it smelled and looked. If you wonder why people come back every week for Test Kitchen, it is because of these moments (plus the free food!).