Pasta with Eggplant Puree

I've spent the last month or two doing very little cooking and have mostly been gorging myself on grilled corn and caprese salad. Is there anything better then tomatoes and corn at the height of summer?

However, this means that other in-season vegetables are woefully being ignored. In attempt to add more variety to my diet, I picked up an eggplant at the market.

I'm still a novice when it comes to cooking eggplant but it always turns out lovely when roasted. This particular eggplant was roasted with cherry tomatoes, then blended together to make a sauce. Because there's a high ratio of eggplant to tomato, the eggplant is the star of the dish.

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Ratatouille

The end of summer means an abundance of ripe tomatoes, sweet peppers, eggplant and zucchini. These vibrant, multicoloured vegetables go beautifully together, both visually and gastronomically.

Ratatouille is an easy dish to throw together - a one pot meal, which is my favourite kind of meal. I've seen recipes where you roast each vegetable separately (!) before they are combined, which seems like an unnecessary amount of dishes and time. Perhaps the flavours are more concentrated when you roast the vegetables separately, though I find this recipe makes a scrumptious stew using seasonal, ripe vegetables.

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Moutabbal

You know what I learned during my travels in Turkey? The Turks can prepare eggplant really, really well. I find it such a finicky vegetable to cook with, as it can be too mushy or bitter, but without fail, every eggplant dish I ordered was insanely delicious (and I ordered many of them). One of the most memorable eggplant dishes that I ate was a meze - an eggplant dip with an intensely smoky flavour, one that I was hoping to replicate.

Unfortunately, I don't have a gas burner so I improvised and threw the eggplants under the broiler in my oven. While this method does not result in a smoky flavour (I'll have to try grilling it on the barbecue in the summer), it does make a wonderful eggplant dip.

Note to self: do not line the baking sheet with parchment paper when broiling things because the paper will BURN. Please see photographic evidence:

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