Tonight I made my old favourite Sicilian meal. It can be vegan or vegetarian depending on your taste. As the nights grow colder this fabulous dish will warm your soul and your belly. It is so good it is hard to believe! I'm actually eating it as I type!
I saw the most magnificent perfect shiny black eggplants in the produce department today and I could not resist my temptation to cook them! They looked like black mirrors!
There are two parts: the sauce and the eggplant. If you treat it as a lasagna, the preparations in largely the same.
Preheat the oven to 150C. You will need a lasagna type oven dish for this to cook in the oven.
Sauce: in a large pot brown a large diced onion in olive oil. Then add three cans of chopped tomatoes, a handful of chopped Continental parsley, half a large jar of Leggo's tomato paste, cracked pepper, a cup of water, Murray River Pink Salt and of course a teaspoon of Massel powdered chicken stock. Bring to the boil and then turn down to the lowest setting to simmer.
Eggplant: peel four fresh eggplants and slice them into 5-6mm slices. Pan fry them until gently brown in hot olive oil and set aside. This process is quite time consuming and the eggplant will soak a lot of the oil, so the fry pan will need to be topped up regularly. Set the fried slices aside.
If you prepare your sauce first, it will be ready to use once the eggplant slices are ready.
Grate your Parmesan Cheese. You will need 3 cups (grated), which is about the size of the piece on the photo (about 200 gms)
Layer your sauce and eggplant pieces in the oven dish, sprinkling each layer with cheese before moving onto the next. Once the layers a complete, pour over any remaining tomato sauce and cheese. Cover the top with the grated Parmesan you have left over.
Cover with foil and bake for 1 hour. Enjoy! (it's hot).