I have been on quite the Mediterranean kick lately.  We spent all summer eating bruschetta and antipasti and I’m definitely not quite ready to give those flavors up.  I just didn’t feel like cooking last night, but I had an eggplant that needed to go and I wanted to cook it up in a tasty recipe Pat brought home a few weeks ago.  It wasn’t quite a meal, so I needed something to round it out.  And so, I immediately thought of pasta and wanted to incorporate my new current favorite things:  marinated artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, black olives, (sun)dried tomatoes and some roasted garlic I had on hand. 

I threw all that in a pan, slightly chopped, and heated them up. I should add here the tomatoes were ones I dried last week, that I poured some really nice olive oil on and stuck in the fridge for safe keeping. (Thanks Leni for the idea!)

I then tossed it with some pasta.  So good.

It was the perfect pairing with the eggplant.

Pat brought this recipe home from Nancy Ross Hugo.   We actually tried it out with friends a few weeks ago when he got it and couldn’t wait to try it out, but this was the first time I’d made it.  The original recipe doesn’t call for breadcrumbs, but the friends we shared this with have dairy allergies, so we subbed breadcrumbs for Parmesan.  So good.  I had a hunk of rosemary-black olive bread to use up, so I turned that into breadcrumbs and threw that on top.  Totally kick-ass.