Roasted Eggplant & Caramelized Tomato Pasta Sauce

I was a pasta sauce virgin till last night. I made my first ever homemade pasta sauce - and I was ridiculously proud of myself! I was just beaming. The recipe is from Vegan YumYum, which I can't praise enough. Here is the reason why you need to go buy the cookbook - farmers market ready recipes. If you are into local food, the environment, eating sustainably, you really need to shell out the minor amount of dough for this cookbook. Many times I go to the farmers mkt and there are a bunch of veggies staring at me and I wonder what the heck else can I do with these guys? Then you check your cookbooks and realize you have to go buy mangoes or yucca or some other crap they import from somewhere far away.

Now, I haven't made most of the recipes from VYY yet, but the ones I have made were very tasty and also didn't require some tropical or hard to find thing. Its very local food friendly.

I'm not going to post the recipe here, b/c you need to go buy the cookbook, but I will say I substituted fresh tomatoes for 50% of the canned and thusly added 2 tsps of tomato paste b/c it needed a bit of sweeness/mellowness. Also I added maybe 1/4 cup of water because I had drained the can of tomatoes and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to but it was looking a bit too thick. Also I used an immersion blender to blend it all up.

We also made a simple pizza topped with garlic infused olive oil and sliced tomatoes in a variety of varieties. It was our typical pizza though we used 2 cups white whole wheat and 1 cup AP flour. So a little drier than an all white flour pizza, but still quite tasty. J. spent much time organizing the tomatoes in a symmetrical fashion. Here's a picture: