I haven’t fixed the other photos yet… slow this week. I’ll upload them later.
Just when I wrote about the Carrot and Peanut sugo this week, I happened to find another great vegetarian sugo recipe in a newspaper around here. Since I had the ingredients at home anyway, I thought I’d give it a try – and because I was craving feta, I then transformed it into an oven-baked dish with a feta crust. Yum.
The sugo is made of roasted eggplant, ground roast walnuts and tomato sauce. I personally think the walnuts were a bit strong and am going to use less next time. I think about half a cup would be enough.
I used macaroni because I love them in baked dishes, but the recipe originally served the sugo with spaghetti, which sounds wonderful – it’s a really think and coating sauce!
Eggplant and walnut sugo
1 food processor
1/2 cup walnuts
1 small or 1/2 large eggplant, diced and salted
2 Tsp olive oil (I use garlic and chili flavoured) for frying
crushed tomatoes or tomato concentrate + water
Rosemary, salt, pepper to taste
Roast the walnuts in a dry pan. Transfer to the food processor and grind to fine crumbles. Set aside.
Roast the eggplant in batches, adding more olive oil whenever necessary. I make thin slices so as much surface as possible gets fried, but I hate how eggplant soaks up so much oil. If you want to decrease the amount of fat, you can consider roasting it in the oven instead like I did in an earlier eggplant sugo recipe.
Puree the eggplant in the food processor. If you don’t like it chunky, add some tomato sauce to make it puree more evenly. Return to the pan and add the walnuts and more tomato sauce to desired consistency. Spice to taste and let simmer another few minutes (or until the pasta is done).
I had boiled macaroni in the meanwhile and distributed them to two lasagna forms coated in butter. The sauce went on top, and a layer of crumbled feta on top of that. Some more rosemary on top and off they went to the oven to bake at 250 degrees C until the cheese got a nice crust. YUM!
Seems to be a good idea for late evenings! Think Bear will thank you for this one! :)