Is that a.. Oh wow aphoto of food above this text? I think it is! Holey mother of all that tastes good in this world, it’s a miracle. *Cough*
It is not a photo of just any food, but a photo of the most perfect eggplant pasta ( see is that a sexy name or what!) ever, even if I do have to say so myself. I do have Casey to backme up, but we know what his reputation is like he flip flops all over the place LOL.
If I know my audience I guess that you are wondering what eggplant pasta (becuase I have no idea what it is in italian except that it might be something like Fettucine con Pomodoro e Melazane ???) has to do with anything. Since this is a foodblog if you guessed that it tastes goood you would be half right and if you guessed that there was a long lost memory of food involved then you would be 1/4 right and if you guessed that this is a dish that had long defeated me in the kitchen you would be 1/4 right. Oh you guessed them all? Well aren’t you a smarty pants it was kind of obvious though as aren’t all food posts about one of those 3 things? Anyway…. I will give you the rundown

A loooonng time ago, when I was still an impressionable teenager, I had a most excellent eggplant pasta and a coffee, they both changed my life. The fact that this occured in Warrawong is both funny and revealing hahhaha… Ever since then I have searched for more coffee that replicates the effect that that amazing coffee had on me and attempted to make an eggplant pasta that is comparable. I have had many awesome coffees since then, but this is the first time that I have managed to replicate the eggplant pasta. The problem was that the eggplant needs to be slightly caramely and perfectly cooked yet it must hold its shape and not have stuck to the frypan and have contrubuted its flavour to the sauce. Well I think I managed to perfect the method.

To make this pasta which is very simple you need to remember 1 cliched thing, that ‘the ingrediants are key’. You need good tomatoes either tinned fresh or in sauce, you need good fresh eggplant preferable the lilac skinned white fleshed ones, and some really good dried pasta. I have started using some really good Italian dried pasta Cav. Giuseppe Cocco Fara S. Martino I dont know if you can get this stuff but if you can do, but only if you have a reliable supply all other pasta tastes bloated and bland in comaprison .

So the method:
Heat for frypan and add some olive oil, diced onions, garlic, chilli and diced eggplant. Put a tight fitting lid on and make sure the temp is low and slowly saute the mix taking the lid off and stirring every now and then until every piece of eggplant has changed colour and cooked through it should be atleast 10 mins. Then add the tomatoes, season add some anchovies and saute until it has thickened and cooked ( I am not teachoing you to suck eggs here). You should have had the pasta water on to boil and cooked the pasta so that the pasta and sauce are ready at aprox the same time.
Mix the sauce and pasta add some grated hard cheese I really like some authentic pecorino romano (but real parmigano is more than acceptable) . Then Eat it! What did you think I was going to say?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.