You see, I had just discovered that there are people in the world who buy fur coats--fur coats that are made from animals! Shocking! What an egregious act, I thought, and one that surely deserved more attention. And so, along with my best friend from school, we joined a group of protesters, were handed anti-fur signs, and headed to Nordstrom.
Sidebar: Looking back, it's quite amusing that this random group of hippies had no problems letting two unknown 12 year olds get into their Vanagon, drive us to downtown Seattle, hand us anti-fur signs, and send us on our merry way. Incidentally, getting into a Vanagon of strangers is but one of many things I wouldn't recommend your child do.
Sidebar #2: I love that this anti-fur demonstration was happening in Seattle. Seattle is one of the most liberal cities in the country and, on top of that, is generally not that cold and mainly damp. Not exactly prime fur wearing territory, but what did I know?
So for the first hour or so, the protest was going well, as far as I could tell. We were walking around Nordstrom telling people not to buy fur and generally speaking, everyone agreed with what we were saying. Then things took a terrible turn. As I was standing out there telling everyone who was walking by about the horrors of wearing fur, a woman came up to me and asked me why I was protesting fur while wearing leather shoes. Crap. Even my 12 year old self realized I was caught being totally hypocritical. After all, there I was, demanding that people avoid wearing fur because it's cruel to kill animals for clothing... and I was wearing leather shoes. So I quickly retorted: "Oh, these aren't leather. They're just really nice fakes." "Really," the woman replied, "Nike makes fake leather shoes?" She chuckled and went on her way. She was right, of course, Nike didn't make fake leather shoes, but saying that all the cool kids wore Nikes and canvas shoes were out of style just didn't seem like as good of an answer as "they're fakes." Needless to say, this was my last fur protest, as I was unwilling to stop wearing cool shoes and couldn't reconcile wearing leather while protesting fur.
A similar conflict has arisen in me in recent years as I've learned more about our production of meat. While we like to believe that happy cows really do come from California and that the meat we eat enjoy lazy days in the sun before dying on their own right before being put into the deep freezer, the reality would appear to be anything but that. And so I have begun to wonder if being an animal lover and meat eater is hypocritical, just like wearing leather shoes and boycotting fur was.
I will leave my full thoughts on this for another day. For now, it's enough to say that my thoughts about meat have forced me to begin to explore more vegetarian meals. This is not something I excel at, as almost every cookbook I've ever used might have a vegetarian section, but it's typically quite small. And so part of my goal for 2011 is to experiment more and start creating more vegetarian main dishes, which brings me to last night.
I decided that one of the easier dishes one could probably make is an eggplant parmigiana. Here's what I did, and I think it turned out pretty darn well. I began by roasting some eggplant slices for about 15 minutes:
Once they were roasted, I put a base layer of a basic tomato sauce, then added a layer of eggplant, then more sauce, freshly shredded mozzarella and parmigiana cheese, and some basil. I repeated that for a few layers, then topped it with some bread crumbs I made in the toaster oven by just cutting up some bread I had on hand:
