College Days' Eggplant Cutlets with Baked Beans

Today, we had a birthing center appointment at 5p and had hoped to get dinner out before an intriguing film (The Visitor) and discussion. We ended up not having enough time to eat so went straight to the movie, and when we left after 10p, it seemed that any restaurant that we wanted to visit was closed when we tried calling.

So we made a quick stop at a local grocery store as we're short on ingredients for a quick meal. I picked up a large locally grown tomato, some frozen eggplant cutlets, and a can of organic maple baked beans. The eggplant was easy to prepare in the toaster oven, and I just heated the beans with some ginger; my stomach sometimes doesn't do well with beans, and the ginger may help. (I would much less likely try eating red or white beans were we traveling, but we were home and, luckily, digestion seemed to work out fine!)

This simple dinner reminded me a little of the kinds of meals I might have put together in college. I thought it was filling and reasonably good, but certainly not particularly interesting.

The film and discussion, by the way, was the first of four monthly ones. As the writeup on the Duke Screen Society website states,

Each spring, Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics organizes a film series
within Screen/Society. The films provide popular and accessible vehicles for
talking about ethics around a particular theme, and each screening is followed
by an open discussion.The Spring 2009 series features 4 films (one narrative
feature and three documentaries) about people forced into exile, whether by
political, economic, or natural causes. The characters find themselves
questioning what constitutes home, who constitutes authority, and where a sense
of meaning and truth resides. These films encourage us to consider the ideas of
place and displacement.