EoMEoTE#8: Eggs on Melanzane Affrogato

Last week I was watching food shows on Public Television as I often do on weekends, and when "Lidia's Family Table" started, I witnessed a true miracle...that episode was completely vegetarian! How exciting for me, as I really like Lidia's style of cooking but more often than not, her shows are entirely meat-based and not much use for me. Anyway, in this episode she focused on summer cooking, and one versatile eggplant-tomato sauce in particular. The traditional Italian name for the sauce is Melanzane Affrogato which literally translates as "suffocated eggplant". Er, suffocated? Why don't we just say "smothered" or "blanketed" and get on with it. The sauce was a marvel of simplicity. You just saute some onion and garlic, saute some peeled diced eggplant with it, then add pepperoncini (hot pepper flakes), salt, tomato puree and whole branches of basil (this is so they can be plucked out in the end), and simmer the whole thing for some unbelievably long time like 2 hours.
As luck would have it, I had an eggplant in the fridge bought just the previous day, and the rest of the ingredients are always at hand, so I made the sauce right away. The sauce took a few minutes to start off, and then simmered on its own while I went off to watch a DVD (Doctor Zhivago), returning to stir it every 15 minutes or so. By the end of the long simmering the eggplant is simply melting into the tomato sauce and the whole apartment is filled with a wonderful Italian-cooking aroma. Lidia demonstrated how versatile this sauce is by making three dishes: a simple pasta dish, using the sauce as a base for scrambled eggs and simmering eggs into the sauce and baking them.
That night, I simply ate the sauce with some whole-wheat pasta and parmesan cheese like so...it was delicious!

The rest of the sauce I placed in the freezer and used yesterday as a base for eggs. I simply reheated the sauce in a skillet till it was simmering...then broke some eggs on top of it and covered and simmered for a few more minutes till the eggs were cooked to perfection. I served the saucy eggs with a rustic Italian loaf from the local bakery.

It made for a wonderful meal, one that is ready in minutes! This is a great sauce to make in quantity and squirrel away for use on busy weeknights.
Then yesterday at the library, I found the companion cookbook to this TV series. Its such a great resource for Northern Italian recipes..I'm looking forward to trying more things from this book soon!