Pasta with eggplant, tomatoes, and basil (vegetarian)

What do you do when you have a spare eggplant at home and your husband (who always demands meat at every meal) isn't home?

You create your own vegetarian pasta dish out of whatever you have in the refrigerator!

I found half an onion in the refrigerator (having made Pasta with Tomato Vodka Cream Sauce only a few days ago). I used a similar technique used in the vodka cream sauce recipe, and sauteed the diced onions in 1 T olive oil and a chunk of frozen tomato paste (approximately 1 tablespoon).

I then added the sliced eggplant (around 3 long thin Japanese eggplants) and about 1/3 cup of broth (you can used chicken or vegetable broth) and cooked until the eggplant slices were soft (~5 minutes? - I can't exactly remember!).

Note about eggplants - if you are cooking with the big American eggplants, you need to soak the slices in water and a bit of salt (~ 1 t) to remove the eggplant's bitter flavors. The thin Japanese eggplants do not have this property and thus do not need to be pre-soaked)

Uhhh . . . I hate to admit the next step, since I typically cook everything from scratch, but then I added a jar of Rao's Tomato basil sauce (one of my favorite jar sauces - it's sooooo good!)

I then added salt to taste, basil leaves, and shaved parmesan cheese on top. I think the parmesan cheese adds the necessary umami flavor to the meal. However, if you want to make the meal vegan, you can easily leave the cheese out.

Haha, after I took the picture at the top of the page, I dumped a bunch more sauce on the dish. I love sauce, and Bryan has accused me of eating pasta with my sauce. Sigh . . maybe he's right. But it was yummy . . . :)