GLORIOUS VEGETABLES
PASTA is a generous co-star. There are some dishes where it takes centre stage, minimally coated with a sauce designed to bring out its wheaty excellence. But just as often, pasta is content to play a supporting role. And in this summery dish, the spotlight is definitely on the vegetables.
The recipe begins with the giant globe eggplant in my fridge. I reason that if I cube the eggplant, oil it and roast it to caramelised tenderness, I can use the half-hour it needs in the oven to figure out what comes next. It’s eggplant season, so naturally I also have a pile of heirloom tomatoes weeping on my counter. They’re so ripe and juicy, I know they’ll defy any knife’s attempt to cube them.
Instead, I rub them over the holes of a box grater, letting the flesh fall into a puree. It’s a technique I use often in tomato season when I have luscious but overripe tomatoes. (Gazpacho is another option.) Added bonus: The grater holes puree the tomato flesh but stop at the peel, so you can very easily get pure pulp without any bits of skin.
Simmering down the tomato pulp with a little olive oil, garlic and chilli is a fast and easy way to make a very fresh tomato sauce. If you cook it down a lot, it becomes intense and thick, like a sofrito, and can be the base of any number of more complex concoctions: Soups, stews and rice dishes.
If you just simmer it briefly to concentrate the sweetness, it’s lovely on pasta, which is what I’ve decided to do. After all, pasta with tomato and eggplant, in myriad manifestations, is one of the glories of summer cooking.
Sauce on the stove, eggplant in the oven, all I need to do to finish the meal is to boil up some pasta and combine everything. Then to season the dish, I add capers for a salty bite, herbs for brightness, a bit of butter for richness and some grated cheese to round it all out. The resulting dish is velvety from the eggplant, sweet from the tomato sauce, tangy with capers and cheese, and fresh from the herbs.
And the mellow, toothsome pasta is there to anchor it all, playing a crucial supporting role to the vegetables - which, in summer, will always be the stars.
NYT
Pasta is always seen to take centre stage but not in this recipe, writes Melissa Clark