Creamy eggplant pasta

My mom came out of the local farm stand with an eggplant just for me! Okay, maybe I wasn’t that excited at the time. I was crazy tired and just wanted to go home and sleep. But I needed dinner anyway so I figured I’d do something with the eggplant. In the past I’ve made an eggplant carbonara that was pretty damned delicious. But it was also so much heavier than I ever seem to want. So I’ve taken to making a creamy eggplant dish that has a lot of the flavor of the carbonara without that “would I feel better if I made myself throw up?” feeling that I get after more than two bites of carbonara.

So the first step for me is cubing the eggplant. Then I spread it on a jelly roll pan. Drizzle olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and bake at 400 F for 10 minutes. Just until the cubes are softened up. You could certainly cook the eggplant on the stove with the onions (in the next step), but I find that the eggplant absorbs less oil if you roast it this way.

While the eggplant is roasting, I chopped up a small onion and began to brown the onion in one tablespoon of butter. I did this on medium-low heat (I think it was a 2 on my stove’s dial) because I knew one tablespoon wasn’t a lot of butter for this and I didn’t want anything to burn. When the eggplant came out of the oven, I added it to the onion. Next, I poured in 1/3 cup half and half and let the mixture simmer for about five minutes.