Pasta with zucchini and egg plant

The first thing to say here is that in England we call zucchini courgettes, which is the French word for it rather than the Italian word.  We call egg plant aubergine, referring to its colour rather than its shape.  I will use those words in this blog.

A Twitter friend asked me to give her this recipe.  I normally cook this with peppers, leek and mushrooms (I have blogged it before).  However, our friend cannot eat peppers so when she came to visit us a Baboon HQ we couldn't cook this recipe for her.  We were given courgettes and aubergines lately so I tried a new version of the recipe that she can eat.

This was a joint effort so, being an organised baboon Edward got the ingredients ready.  Here are the ingredients for two:

8 oz pasta
1 leek
1 aubergine
1 large or two small courgettes (we were given some fancy yellow ones but the green ones will be equally nice)
1/4 pint of yogurt
Two table spoons of olive oil
Some lemon juice to taste
Black pepper (plenty)
Later you will need some hard cheese (I don't add salt in the cooking because I use a salty cheese), the original recipe said 2 oz of cheese but I use much more to give it a nice crispy topping.

Being organised Edward also wanted to show you most of the equipment you will need:

 

 

You need two large saucepans, a pyrex or other oven proof dish, wooden spoons, table spoons, a vegetable knife and a cheese grater.



Yaya is safe using knives so he prepared the ingredients.  Chop the leek into small pieces and the aubergine and courgettes into bite sized pieces.

We found that the courgettes needed a bit more frying than the leek and aubergine so, heat up the olive oil in a pan and fry the courgette gently for five minutes, add the aubergine and leek and fry gently for a further seven minutes.  Turn your grill onto quite a high heat.

In the meantime boil the pasta and grate the cheese.  When the vegetables are fried turn the heat off and add the yogurt, black pepper and lemon juice to taste (just a sprinkle).

Mix the vegetables in their sauce with the pasta in an oven proof dish, the bigger the surface area the better because you can get more crispy topping, sprinkle the cheese on top.  Put the dish under the grill, after about 7 minutes I usually turn the grill up a bit to get a good crisp finish.  It should be under for about 15 minutes in total (not sure whether a gas grill might be a bit quicker, mine is electric).  You will need to see when it looks done.  Hoppo got all this ready to go under the grill.

Now looking at the next picture you might think that Marley has taken up some strange sport, but this is a warning.

These are sillicone oven gloves which our friend sent from Germany.  These are what you need!!  Getting pyrex dishes out from under the grill is a very hot business.  We used to wear two sets of well insulated cloth oven gloves and it was still too hot to handle.  With these sillicone oven gloves you don't feel a thing.  Marley got it out of the oven.

 

Here it is all ready to serve with a lovely crispy topping.  We think this new version is at least as good as the original version.  Hope you enjoy it!!