what is better than a low-carb Italian favourite not much today I'm going to show you how to make eggplant rollatini cat heart style a little piece of heart I'm going to slice up some eggplant and then we're going to make a filling with ricotta cheese and my secret ingredient that is going to spice it up some spicy Italian sausage first off I have to prep my eggplant now when we're cooking an eggplant like this we can't just cut it and roll it it'll it'll break in half so we have to bake it first I have my oven preheated at 375 degrees and I have a 1 pound eggplant right here and what I'm looking for this is a serving for two to three people so we're looking for 8 good slices of eggplant that I can put on my baking tray and we can bake just to get some of the moisture out and to make it really pliable so we can roll it up with our filling the first step would be to take our eggplant and cut the end right off and this will help us guide us on the mandolin as well now the I plan is going to be put cut into a quarter inch slice I feel like this is the best slice it's not too thick not too thin and I am going to leave the skin on now I know some people might be skeptical about leaving the skin on my sister is one of them but when she ate this she barely even noticed it was there it literally melts in your mouth it does not become stringy it's it's actually really good so give it a try if you don't like the skin definitely peel it at this stage but I'm going to leave the skin on so we have our mandolin here if you don't have a mandolin that's fine just cut it into you know thin slices about a quarter of an inch thick and don't don't be scared to use a measuring tape I do it all the time even when I'm cooking other people's recipes I like to know exactly how thick or thin to cut something so now the first slice is going to be all skin so we're going to discard that one we're going to go right down the mandolin ok see first slice clean cut and we're going to discard it only because it's all skinned and it's going to be a little bit smaller than the other pieces so let's see okay and as we cut them look at that it's perfect this is the perfect slice so it's good thing we cut off the skin because now we have a good piece now we're going to lay them on a Silpat just like this if you don't have a sill pad you should buy one I use this every day it's it's like $20 you can get them on Amazon it's so worth it because you don't have to spray it with anything your um your tray doesn't get a mess I mean I use it so much for this if you don't have one just use some tinfoil and you know I like my cooking spray because I don't like things to stick so I would spray a little bit of cooking spray use some tinfoil and you're good to go so I'm going to make eight more or seven more slices of this and here we go so we have our eight slices of eggplant ready to go I'm going to pop this into a 375 degree oven for 10 minutes and like I said the reason we're doing that is to make sure that the eggplant gets pliable so we can roll it if I do it right now it'll snap in half and also it releases some of the moisture from the eggplant and by doing that it makes it so our eggplant rollatini dish is not soggy or extra wet and watering down the sauce because we definitely don't want that in the meantime while the eggplant cooks we're going to brown some sausage for my filling so meet me over by the stove first step to making our filling is some Italian sausage I have about a teaspoon of oil in here just so that the sausage has something to cook around with and I'm going to take the sausage by the pot half of a pound and put it right in like I always say we have a sigle which is exactly what we want we want this to start cooking immediately as soon as it hits the pan so mine were actually patties that's what my grocery store does um you can only find it with the casings just remove the casings and then you can just sautee it just like it's regular on ground sausage we're going to saute the ground sausage the probably through when we want to cook it all the way through and then we want to cool it down a little bit before we add it to our second part of our filling is the ricotta cheese Parmesan cheese mozzarella cheese so we're going to assemble that next and then we're waiting also for advanced methods oven so you can turn our goal now we're going to start to assemble our filling we're really quick I left the oven on at 375 I took out the eggplant cuz it was in there for 10 minutes so now that's on the stove cooling and I also finished browning my sausage and I drained out any excess oil so it's not going to give us a greasy rollatini we want both of those things to cool down because we don't want to add really hot things to a cheese mixture and we don't want to roll up hot eggplant they'll hurt your fingers so we're going to start doing our filling right now now I want to add some cheese to the cheese to the cheese so we got three kinds of cheese going on here we have ricotta cheese I use whole milk ricotta and the next thing that we're going to add is some Parmesan cheese now you can use any kind I've used I'm using a really really powdery kind today put that right in next cheese is some whole milk mozzarella cheese now now they sell you know pizza mixes they sell Italian cheese blends go crazy do whatever kind of cheese you like I just like plain mozzarella cheese keep it simple I'm going to add half of this then the other half I'm going to actually save to tap the rollatini width right before we bake it onto the spices so I'm going to use you know some normal spices like salt and pepper and then some other Italian favorites that are so and Papa great next Italian seasoning you got to put this in because this is going to give us that basil the oregano the parsley it's going to give us all those warm flavors that we know and love for an Italian food and then of course garlic powder I rarely cook without it if you've seen any of my other videos unless I'm like making a dessert even in breakfast there's going to be garlic all right perfect there we go last spice is going to be some onion powder garlic onion they go together perfect okay so now before I am at my sausage in I'm actually going to just give this a mix and before I add a beaten egg I'm going to taste it because I don't want to eat raw egg and the eggs not really going to give it much flavor but the egg is going to kind of help keep the mixture together so that doesn't get too runny while it's in the oven this is looking great you can see that Italian seasoning and the pepper running through all of the cheese's everything is melding together perfectly alright so what I'm going to do is just grab my tasting spoon just a little bit I just want to make sure that all the spices are good mmm perfect filling right here mmm perfect - voices and salt and pepper that is key to this because if you don't have enough salt enough seasoning you're not gonna have a good filling and then the sauce might carry you but the filling is where it's at you want it to be nice and gooey this is perfect all right cheese off of my lip gloss so now since we know we like this we're going to add in our egg now so I'm going to add in one beaten egg and I'm going to mix it one more time just to get that all incorporated see why we didn't want to taste it after we did this I actually had to do it the other day it was kind of gross I just pretended it was brownie batter which I have no problem eating with raw egg in it but those days are over it's low carb now all right perfect see it just mixes right in so now I'm actually going to go and grab the sausage and we're going to fold that right into our cheese mixture now remember this is half a pound of sauteed browned hot Italian sausage if you don't like to use hot sausage if you're cooking for kids it's fine just go ahead and use mild it's whatever you like that's what's great about a majority of my recipes it's whatever you have on hand and whatever your flavor preference is yummy the minute the sausage hits the cheese all those spices latch onto the sausage and it literally smells amazing it hasn't even hit the oven yet all right great so this is the mixture we're working with now ricotta cheese mozzarella cheese Parmesan cheese a bunch of spices and some sausage so what I'm going to do next is run my spatula so that it flattens out the top surface of my mixture and since we have 8 eggplants I want to make sure that each eggplant kind of gets the same amount so I'm just going to score it just eyeballing it so that I make eight amounts this will help me in a second when I am going to be assembling the eggplant rollatini because then each one will kind of get the same amount if you just start scooping sometimes you end up with a gigantic blob at the end and one that's too skinny and then sometimes you end up with not enough for your very last eggplant so this actually is a really helpful tip helps me every time sometimes I forget to do it and it I wish I did it and so that's for that's what we're going to do for that right now I'm going to clean up a little bit and then I'm going to start assembling our eggplant rollatini I'll meet you right back here what we want to do is take our swed an 8 by 8 just a square pan this should fit 4 4 & 4 on each side 2 rows or 4 and we want to take some sauce this also I'm using today is a Fra Diavolo sauce that I actually bought at the store you could use any kind of sauce you like or any kind that you make it's totally up to you this is the cool part like I said do whatever you want or have I like to actually go to the supermarket and buy a local brand of sauce which this one is so it's nice and fresh and actually tastes homemade so I mean if you can buy a jar sauce for less than $10 and you don't have to you know cook gravy all day like why not especially during a busy weeknight this is the perfect meal because it comes together pretty quickly so I put in enough sauce just to cover the bottom of the pan here because we want our eggplant to sit in something now I'm going to assemble the eggplant rollatini as you can see my eggplant dried out a little bit but they didn't shrink in size but look at that totally pliable look at that they're not breaking nothing so this is perfect this is exactly what we want and that's why the thickness and the time in the oven are perfect I'm going to put the skinnier end right there now remember I scored my filling so I know exactly how much to take for each eggplant hat each eggplant slice what I like to do is put the filling right in the middle not in the mouth in the middle of the eggplant off to one side and then you're going to spread it out so you're going to want to spread your filling and leave about an inch border right at the end and I'll show you why right now because we're going to take our eggplant and start and just do a simple roll loose roll but as you can see the filling is pushing itself towards the end so we want to go like that perfect roll right there gorgeous isn't it it even looks cute so we're going to assemble eight of these four on the side or on that side and here we go all our eggplant are rolled and ready to go so what I like to do is before I do any cheese I like to do a little bit of sauce just on top of each one why I don't know I just feel like it keeps everything kind of moist and it lets that cheese stick to something so it doesn't just fall down into the dish the rest of the sauce that I have in this bowl I'm actually going to warm up on the stove just in case anybody you know wants to put some on top I like a lot of sauce j-league full of sauce so I like to have some extra warmth upon the stove just to use as a gravy at the end when you're ready to serve so here I have the rest of my mozzarella cheese whole milk we're going to just go ahead and top each piece with a generous amount of cheese now this is where you can use as much cheese or as least cheese whatever you want to call it is you know as much as you want because some people like a lot of cheese some people don't they want to kind of two calories little lower so definitely you know go a little lighter on the cheese since it's cheese filling I had about half a cup in the filling and this is the other half of the cup so just one cup in the whole dish and this will feed about you know three or four people depending on how many each person gets I'm just going to go on with the rest and the best part is just like my meatball parmesan recipe when you put the cheese like this and then their sauce on the bottom the cheese on the bottom will get all gooey in the sauce and it just creates this amazing meal this great great meal so what I'm going to do is stick this in a 375-degree oven I never turned it off from before and it's going to be in there for about twenty-five minutes now at that point what I like to do because I like it when the cheese gets brown and bubbly on top I'm going to put it under the broiler for about two minutes but watch it carefully because your broiler might be stronger than mine and then after that I'm going to take it out and I'm going to let it sit for five minutes because just like lasagna you don't want to if you know with noodles and everything you don't want to cut right into it as soon as it's out of the oven not only is it going to be extremely hot but it's going to kind of be breaking apart and watery you want to give it a couple minutes just to sit on the stove just so that it cools down a little bit and it keeps all the flavor in the cheese doesn't get all gooey so I'm going to pop this in the oven and I will see you back here Oh sooner than later because I can't wait to try this how amazing does this look I can't even take it can you believe this is a low carb dinner and we're eating Italian food it's like you're not you're going to miss the pasta that's the best part about this I'm actually going to put myself off the piece because I want to try this and I want to tell you exactly how great it is so let's say I'm going to pick this one here look at that see how the sauce is not watery look at that it's not watery at all that's because we baked our eggplant first and your filling doesn't ooze out look how great it stays together that's what that egg did it binded everything together perfectly now I was warming sauce on the stove but you could easily get enough sauce on the bottom here just depends how much you have if you had a Caesar salad or side salad with this this is a complete dinner so it's great and it's easy for a weeknight meal to especially we use jarred tomato sauce cut right in the middle and because we let it sit staying together that's a huge piece I'm not going to eat that at one bite the perfect bite right here mozzarella good.we mozzarella included still pretty hot mmm when our winner right here Wow and you know what because I use Fra Diavolo sauce and I use spicy Italian sausage getting a little bit of heat right back here right now it is phenomenal mmm this is great it's good to entertain with double this recipe triple it make a whole tray if you don't want to do low-carb stuff it into some pasta shells the big jumbo shells I did that for my sister the other week because she just had a baby so I did that for her at the dinner that she could have she's not low-carb she wanted the shells so that's what she got so it's such a versatile dish this filling can go in a bunch of different things use them in lasagna it's great for this recipe as well as many others go to my blog little piece of heart and I will see you next time for another episode in my kitchen