Eggplant Parmigiano

                                                                                            If it weren't for the glimpses of magnitude of whatever I am attempting to do on these long and winding culinary roads, I think like many authors, poets and philandering philosophers, would end up a cantankerous Curmudgeon, biting down on my lower lip, unable to effectively walk the plank to the mythical or mystical edge of darkness, known to be called at times, the kitchen or in my case the dish pit.                       
        Though here, often savoring any glory from the two bit pathway to heaven, I am so much more than the weasel I so often portray in the kitchen.  Today's one way road to being "Back in Black", or "Burning down the House", is Eggplant Parmigiano.

        First one must come up with a suitable Eggplant, though I am not so much into profiling my eggplant, I do enjoy the nuance or two of a egghead shaped Black Beauty, only because it renders the intellectual side, symbolically to my misguided fortunes in the kitchen.

        So be it, after that sidebar, one slices the components of the dance the light fantastic, including onions, zucchini, garlic,tomato, cilantro, fresh picked rosemary from our garden, and sprinkles of ground pepper straight out of the grinder, and dried sweet basil and Italian seasoning.  I, of course, delineate the flavor profiles and squeeze some form of intuitiveness out of each of item, grilling them all in either soy sauce or worchestshire sauce, or one at a time in a common fry pan.  


         Cautiously I dip the sliced eggplant into the customary flour, egg and panko menage a trois, and fry them to a golden brown.  Furthermore, after much cajoling, I place them gingerly into a glass cooking device and layer all the magnanimous cretins atop an already glorious black impressionistic glob of eggplant, smother it in yogurt, mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce,olives, and pinto beans, and proceed straight to jail, without collecting 200 dollars of Milton Bradley's money, and without passing Go, for my lust, if only in my mind, as President Carter used to do, whence upon a time, of a linear projection of the final burst of delicious visual pleasure.  


         The now romantic renaissance of a culture gone mad, not the pleasantly stoic eyeful of a solemn lump of Curmudgeon that Teri Skinner often surmises that she is so intrigued with his mutterings on the teletyped interface of the keyboard.  To all of you who rise to this juggernaut of success in the Steven, overatures to demographic spontaniety in the culinary sense of it's own humanity, Child, I glance down the rows of rising souls, and wish all of you a GOOD MORNING VIET NAM...it is not the smell of napalm so much in the morning, but rather the smell of wisdom, emanating from the wiffs of freedom one derives from Eggplant Parmigiano, so eloquently surrenders before eight in the morning, that keeps the Fire in the Belly of a man no longer Marked for his Extroversional Leanings