Finding good eggplants here is a rare occurance. Unfortunately, most eggplants I look at are bruised and/or squishy. So when I find good eggplants, I snatch them up. Last week, I found a pair of good looking eggplants so I bought them and tossed them into my fridge. Luckily, I had a recipe that I wanted to try them with.

I took the eggplants, peeled and sliced them and soaked them in salt water for 5 minutes to help remove the bitterness. Next, I combined some cottege cheese, eggbeaters, salt a pepper in one bowl and tomato sauce, basil and oregano in another. Then, in a non-stick cooking sprayed crockpot, I layered the eggplant, cottege cheese and sauce. Four hours on high later, it was dinner time.

B loved it. She declared it “amazing” and had seconds. In fact, she loved it so much, that my poor side dish (pasta with a tomato sauce, zucchini, broccoli and mushrooms) was pronounced “meh.” It wasn’t that she didn’t like the pasta, she did. It was that it just didn’t hold up in comparison to the eggplant.

Here are some photos of the results:

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And, of course, here is the all-important recipe:

Eggplant Italian

Book: Fix-It and Forget-It Lightly – Healthy, Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker by Phyllis Pellman Good

Recipe by: Melanie Thrower

Makes 6-8 servings

(Ideal slow-cooker size: 4 or 5 quart; and oval cooker works best)

• 2 eggplants
• 1/4 cup eggbeaters
• 24 oz fat-free cottage cheese
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• black pepper to taste
• 14 oz can tomato sauce
• 2-4 Tbsp Italian seasoning, according to your taste preference (I used 1Tbsp dried Oregano and 1Tbsp dried Basil)

1. Peel eggplants and cut in 1/2″ thick slices. Soak in salt-water for about 5 minutes to remove bitterness. Drain well.
2. Spray slow-cooker with fat-free cooking spray.
3. Mix eggbeaters, cottage cheese, salt, and pepper together in bowl.
4. Mix tomato sauce and Italian seasoning together in another bowl.
5. Spoon a thin layer of tomato sauce into the bottom of slow cooker. Top with about one-third of the eggplant slices, and then one-third of the egg/cheese mixture, and finally one-third of the remaining tomato sauce mixture.
6. Repeat those layers twice, ending with seasoned tomato sauce.
7. Cover. Cook on high 4 hours. Allow to rest 15 minutes before serving.

Per Serving: 120 calories (10 calories from fat), 1g total fat (0g saturated, 0gtrans), 30mg cholesterol, 940mg sodium, 17g total carbohydrate (4g fiber, 11g sugar), 11g protein, 15% DV vitamin A, 4% DV vitamin C, 8% DV calcium, 4% DV iron.

Here’s wishing you good cooking!

Chef TechyDad

When I started blogging, I looked at other blogs to see what other Daddy (and Mommy) bloggers were doing. One thing that interested me was product reviews. When I worked for a computer magazine, I had the chance to do a few hardware and software reviews and I loved it. The chance to try a new product out, see how good it was and write a balanced article detailing the product’s strengths and weaknesses just appealed to me. Unfortunately, I had no clue how to connect with anyone to start reviewing products.

Enter Tara from Feels Like Home and Adreinne from Adrienne’s House. They have started “Spotlight on PR” to help bloggers connect with PR professionals. I would like to thank both of them for their efforts (as well as my wife for alerting me to this.)

A big welcome to everyone just stopping by from Spotlight on PR. My name is TechyDad. Ok, it’s not really TechyDad, but I prefer to keep a measure of anonymity online. Back in the young and innocent days of the web, I used my real name when posting online. After being married and having two wonderful children, however, I began to question the wisdom of posting my full name and real city of residence all over the place. My wife, TheAngelForever, had started a blog a few years back and kept herself anonymous so I decided to follow suit. Thus, TechyDad was born.

Despite my short time blogging under the TechyDad name, I’m an old-school ‘Net user from way back. I remember using Gopher back in college on my college’s VAX computers. (To those who don’t know what I just said, Gopher was a pre-web information network and VAX were old text-only terminal computers.) I’m a web developer by trade, but also enjoy cooking, photography, gardening, reading, writing and a lot of other eclectic hobbies. As I said before, I’m married to TheAngelForever and we have two wonderful sons. NHL is almost 6 (just 10 days to go as I write this) and JSL is 2.

My blog, like myself, is an eclectic mix. One post may be about a programming project I’m working on. The next might be about a minigolfing trip with NHL. The one after that might be about copyright law and the one following that might be about a new gadget I’m drooling over. To paraphrase Forrest Gump: My blog is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.

I’m always interested in new projects and would love to hear from people with ideas for product reviews, interviews or pretty much anything else. You can contact me via e-mail at TechyDad at TechyDad dot com or by using the “Contact Me” link at the top of this page. In addition, you can check out the “About” link for more information about me. (Though, to be honest, I copied a lot of that information into this blog post.) I look forward to starting some interesting conversations.

If you’ve checked out any of the (many) photos I’ve posted, you might have noticed that I watermark my photos. It’s subtle, but in the bottom right hand corner of every photo it says “www.TechyDad.com”.

Why do I do this? Well, as much as I’d like to assume that people are good, there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there that will grab photos off the Internet for their own use. By watermarking the photo, I’m decreasing its value to these people. (Yes, the watermark could be removed, but it’d take time and effort to do so. The photo thieves are more likely to just head elsewhere to grab some photos.)

In addition to the watermarking, I also rotate some photos (depending on which way they were taken) and resize them for the web. Unfortunately, when I have a lot of photos to process, this can be a time-consuming pain. Initially, my process looked like this:

1. Load one photo in Irfanview
2. Open up Irfanview’s Thumbnail mode
3. Select all images to process
4. Use Irfanview’s lossless-JPEG rotate function to auto-rotate all photos
5. Open up Irfanview’s Batch Conversion mode
6. Select all photos to process and conversion settings (e.g. new height/width)
7. Wait until Batch Conversion is done.
8. Open up Picture Shark.
9. Select All Photos
10. Select Watermark
11. Wait until watermark is applied to all photos
12. Post photos

You can see how this would make photo posting a pain, but each step was necessary. I couldn’t post sideways photos and couldn’t post full-res pictures either. There’s the download time issue as well as the aforementioned picture thieves.

That’s when I remembered about ImageMagick. ImageMagick is a freeware photo manipulation program that is often used on servers to, well, manipulate images. My server, for example, uses it to make thumbnails out of the photos I upload. The only problem is that ImageMagick doesn’t have an graphical interface. It is run by a series of command line statements. This is perfectly fine for a script running on a server, but not as good for a human user.

Since all I wanted to do was run the same commands over and over, and since I know how to program, I wrote a Photo Processor script. It would let me specify the directory that the photos were in, whether I wanted them resized/rotated/watermarked and even allowed me to select which watermark. This way, B could use the same script for TheAngelForever.com. My new photo processing process was:

1. Run Script
2. Copy/Paste name of directory with photos
3. Answer dialogs for resizing/rotating/watermarking photos.
4. Wait until script finishes
5. Post photos

Much easier, right?

When Monkey was born to Tarzan and Jane over at HisBoysCanSwim, I noticed that their photos of Monkey merely had some text at the bottom of them. This would be easily stripped out by a picture thief so I offered my Photo Processor script. And while I was working on it, I figured I’d post a version for everyone else out there.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install a copy of ImageMagick on your PC. In the configuration screen during setup (the one with all of the checkboxes), make sure that you check the box for “Install ImageMagickObject OLE Control for VBScript, Visual Basic, and WSH.” (See image below.)

Once that is done, download my Photo Processor script. When you run the script, first you’ll need to enter the directory of the photos to be processed (e.g. C:\Photos\My Trip To The Beach\). Don’t worry if they’re your originals, the altered versions will be saved in newly created subdirectories. After you enter the directory, simply answer a few Yes/No questions to set whether the photos are rotated and/or resized and sit back and wait for the script to do its job. To add a watermark, put a PNG image in the same directory as the script and name it “Watermark.png.”

If you have any questions about this script, feel free to post them in the comments below.

Last Sunday, during JSL’s nap-time, I decided to spend some time with NHL and give B some time to herself. So I took NHL to his first game of mini-golf. Now the skies were not bright and sunny. In fact, some raindrops came down upon us as we arrived at our destination. Not to worry though because the place we went to had indoor mini-golf.

After paying for our golfing session, we headed to the indoor mini-golf area. As we got our clubs, I told NHL to look at his shoes. Thanks to the black light, they were glowing. NHL was quite amused to discover that his socks, white stripe on his pants and even my shoelaces were glowing as well.

We entered the mini-golfing area and a nice family of ten in front of us allowed us to play through. Thanks go out to them. I’m sure NHL would have gotten very frustrated if he needed to wait for 10 people to finish each hole before he could proceed.

The first set of holes had an under the sea theme. Here, we shot balls past an octopus and into a shark’s mouth. Next, we entered a jungle and attempted to get our balls past a bear, tiger, and a big purple gorilla. After we exited the jungle, a time warp took us to a prehistoric era. Here, we putted past a triceratops and NHL was almost eaten by a velociraptor. Finally, we launched into space were we faced off against robots and aliens before our balls were sucked into a black hole.

NHL loved every minute of indoor mini-golf and it was over all too quickly. After a quick call to B to make sure that everything was alright at home, NHL and I stopped by the soft serve ice cream stand right next to the mini-golf. (Talk about convenient!) Luckily, by this point, the sun had fought off some of the clouds. We both had chocolate and vanilla swirl soft serve ice cream, though we had to put our quickly melting conefuls into cups to eat them less messily.

After a quick peek at the outdoor mini-golf course that they had (and protests by NHL that he wanted to play more mini-golf), we headed home hoping to soon head back for more mini-golf fun. Maybe next time JSL will join us.

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