Veggie Pasta al Pomodoro

Looking for a way to use up some veggies you just came home with? Have an intense fascination with pasta? If so, you just might be my better half. We came home with an eggplant, a summer squash, a couple tomatoes, some broccoli, and an onion from a previous week. After a little searching, we decided to make a fresh and light pasta al pomodoro.

We briefly considered making baba ganoush, but the roasting or grilling step, not to mention the three hours chilling in the fridge, required more time that we had. Instead I stumbled upon a recipe for Eggplant Pomodoro, and knew we found our base recipe. The rest was up to us to tweak to match our ingredients. This recipe is very forgiving, but here's what we used:

Ingredients

• 1 pound package whole wheat penne rigatoni
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 medium onion
• 1 eggplant, about one pound
• 1 summer squash
• 4 or 5 roma tomatoes
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 head broccoli
• dash red pepper flakes
• 1/3 cup kalamata olives
• 1 tablespoon capers
• basil, to garnish

Directions

1. Boil water for pasta, per package directions. Continue with other steps as you cook the pasta.
2. Dice all vegetables, and mince the garlic and olives.
3. Heat a large saute pan over medium heat.
4. Saute onions in olive oil until translucent.
5. Add eggplant and summer squash, and cook for three to five minutes.
6. Add garlic, tomatoes, broccoli, and red pepper flakes. Cook five to seven minutes until tomatoes start to break down.
7. Add olives and capers until heated through.
8. Serve over drained pasta, and top with basil.

He said

I love what the olives and capers did for this dish. They take it from a run-of-the-mill, lightly tomato flavored pasta dish to one with some zing and pizzazz. The recipe we based this on recommended green olives and capers, which strikes me as two almost redundant flavors. Since we had kalamata olives on hand instead, I was happy to substitute them in.

I'm not sure that penne rigatoni was the best match for this dish. Supposedly the ridges are meant to carry sauce, but this method makes only a very light sauce that any pasta should be able to carry. Perhaps next time we could try angelhair.

She said

Pasta. I can never get enough pasta. And veggies with pasta. A beautiful combination. We usually try to go with the whole wheat variety whenever we make any sort of pasta. We like the taste, and we like the extra nutritional value that it offers.

The olives we used in this particular dish were from a jar with some red wine vinegar. We didn't bother to rinse the olives, and I'm glad we didn't, since the vinegar added some subtle yummy flavor.

Skip the red pepper flakes if you don't like spicy food. I added a just a little bit to this dish since I was feeling a little squeamish, but we probably would have enjoyed a couple more shakes of it without it being too spicy for us.