Is It Still Eggplant Parmesan If There’s No Parmesan?

Ever since I moved in with my host family, I’ve been promising to make an “American” meal. If you think about it, this is harder than it sounds. For one, what’s American food? I know at home in the states I eat pasta, stir-fry, soups, etcetera on a regular basis but they tend to originate from Italy, Thailand, Mexico, and many of the other cuisines Americans have embraced and made our own. The second challenge was identifying a meal to prepare with ingredients available in Sveti Nikole. Ultimately I settled on making eggplant parmesan, “American” salad, garlic bread, and brownies.

I set out with my host mom, sister, and nephew to scout out the ingredients for our American meal. The first stop was the open air bazaar where we got eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, walnuts, eggs, and spinach. My Macedonian family doesn’t usually eat spinach, so there were several jokes about turning into Popeye (which is shown on TV here, dubbed into Macedonian). Next we moved on to the challenging items, namely parmesan and mozzarella cheese. After stopping at four grocery stores, we found one package of what claimed to be mozzarella (but upon tasting it later while cooking, that claim seems dubious) and a pretty passable parmesan substitute (but no actual parmesan). The other hard-to-find ingredient was tomato sauce because Macedonians typically put ketchup on pasta (and yes, it’s about as disappointing as it sounds, particularly when they do the popular ketchup-mayo combo). I did locate two jars of tomato sauce, unfortunately not of the same flavor combination, but I didn’t let that deter us from buying them. Once we got everything home, my host sister Katerina cryptically said the meal “would be interesting” and left me to the cooking.

Eggplant parmesan (or whatever kind of cheese it is that I used) is pretty labor intensive and I’d never made it before, so I’m sure that didn’t help. It took me about 4 hours to crank out the entire meal and dessert. All told, that’s a very fair tradeoff for my host parents cooking every other meal for 10 weeks.

The surprise hit of the meal was the salad. I thought the spinach would be a deal breaker because Macedonians usually eat either “chopped salad”—tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and feta—or shredded cabbage with olives, both salads topped with copious amounts of oil. For my "American" salad, I doctored up my own dressing and my family polished off the whole thing. I can’t say the eggplant parmesan was as well embraced—I think the tomato sauce was too much for their ketchup palates. They did like the eggplant sans tomato sauce and I think they might do just the fried breaded eggplant on their own again. The garlic bread definitely fell flat—I guess it’s an acquired taste. But luckily I ended strong with the brownies, with half the pan polished off in one sitting. At my family’s request, I translated the brownie recipe into Macedonian (as best I’m able) using our Friday language lesson vocab on cooking. I also made my shopping list in Macedonian so cooking, like watching TV, is something I’m calling “studying.”