The Wednesday Chef’s Eggplant Dish

I’ve been reading The Wednesday Chef blog for as long as I have been reading food blogs, and this particular post for Francis Lam’s Let-My-Eggplant-Go-Free! Spaghetti caught my eye. The Wednesday Chef has a way with words, especially when those words are about food. I find my mouth watering every time I read a new post and scroll through her amazing food photography. I like eggplant prepared any way, but an eggplant sauce? This was new to me, and I wanted a taste. Fortunately I picked up these beauties at the farm stand:

Those gorgeous eggplants wound up looking a bit like brown mush once they were turned into sauce, but it tasted just as good as I imagined.

The only edit I made to this recipe (woo hoo only 1 edit!) was that I used a squirt of tomato paste instead of the 2 tablespoons sun-dried or oven-dried tomatoes, since I didn’t have those on hand. Also, I had been boiling leeks earlier in the evening and instead of tossing the leek water down the drain, and all of it’s nutrients along with it, I reused the water to boil the pasta to soak them right back up again. I used whole wheat angel hair pasta. I know pasta is pasta but why do I love angel hair more than I’ll ever like spaghetti?

The Wednesday Chef described this dish better than I ever could:

The noodles, chewy and slippery, curl around the pockets of sweet, savory eggplant, the basil snakes between each bite and a pop of tomato here and there makes the water run together in your mouth as you eat. You don’t even need a grating of Parmigiano. You’ve got all you ever needed on your plate, right there.

She also noted this about the pasta (and I agree – we cooked about 2 pounds of eggplant to 4 servings of pasta):

One last thing: the recipe below says that a one-pound eggplant will be enough for a pound of spaghetti, but we ate far less spaghetti than that (190 grams for the two of us, actually) and while there was more sauce than any of my Italian family members would have deemed acceptable on our plates, you might want to adjust your sauce-to-noodle ratio as you see fit.

Head on over to The Wednesday Chef’s blog for more mouthwatering recipes…especially if you like avocados on toast.