Supper, Friday April 21: tossed salad (garden greens and radish, sunflower seeds, shredded parm, caesar dressing); cous-cous; not-bolognese-but-kinda-stewey-tomato-thing (onion, carrot, green pepper, garlic, kidney beans, kalamata olives, eggplant, tomato, marsala, Italian herbs).
What I did end up making turned out pretty damned good. I diced onion, green pepper, carrot, and kalamatas and sauteed them with some minced garlic. I strained a quart jar of our home made crushed tomatoes and added the juice and some marsala. I reserved the tomato meat for adding later. I wanted to preserve the chunkiness of the crushed tomatoes. I let this simmer until the marsala/tomato juice was substantially reduced, adding thyme, basil, oregano, and black pepper about half way through.
To finish it off I added the held tomato, drained kidney beans, and the eggplant. I need to talk about the eggplant for a moment. We had a good year last summer with the eggplant. We ate it grilled, in eggplant parm, and baba ganoush to name a few. One of the things I discovered at that time was that if some eggplant is added to a marinara and pureed with the rest of the sauce the eggplant adds body to the sauce, and bonus: it sticks to the pasta. Use a quarter to a third eggplant by volume. So how did I preserve the eggplant? Bake it as if being prepared for baba ganoush (it can be used for that also). Peel it and bag the flesh and freeze it. So the eggplant I added was cooked peeled and coarsely chopped.
Once all the ingredients were in the pot I simmered it until I got a stew-like texture. I came up with cous-cous 'cause I thought "It's Italian in the flavor profile so it would work with some kind of pasta, and it's got the consistency of a, say, Moroccan stew. . . ah, cous-cous, yeah." Topped it with a little parm because cheese.
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