eggplant!!

one vegetable I have always found perplexing is eggplant. I tried to cook it once YEARS ago (before I was even vegan!!) and did it totally wrong, and it was inedible, and ever since then I have avoided trying to cook with it. I love the taste of it, and will eat it when I go out, but that's it! anyway, the other night I went to a friend's house for dinner and she made a baked eggplant dish with tomato sauce. we ate it over penne pasta with herbs, and I could not get over how amazing it was! I asked her what the key to cooking eggplant was, and she said that you needed to soak it in salt water for about 20 minutes.
so, today I went to Trader Joe's and bought an eggplant, a jar of marinara sauce, a bag of sliced mushrooms, and some frozen fire roasted peppers and onions.

I sliced the eggplant and let it sit in a bowl of salt water for about half an hour (my slices were really thick). I then preheated the oven to 400 degrees. to assemble the dish, I spread a thin layer of sauce in an 8x8 baking dish, then layered the eggplant (I slightly overlapped the edges to fit them all in the pan), mushrooms, and peppers, then covered everything with the rest of the sauce. I covered the dish with aluminum foil and baked for about 25 minutes.
while the eggplant was in the oven, I boiled a pot of water to make the pasta.

when the pasta was done I drained it and tossed it with a little bit of olive oil and italian seasoning.
basically, this dish is amazing and I can't wait to start experimenting more with eggplant!!

this meal cost less than $5 to make (all ingredients were bought from Trader Joe's), and makes at least 4 servings!