Eggplant Pasta

I overestimated how much eggplant I would need to make eggplant parmesan, and I ended up with a whole eggplant sitting in my refrigerator for a week.  After it had been tossed around and bruised sufficiently, I decided that I needed to either cook something with it soon, or it would have to be pitched.  I was thinking about making baba ganoush, but I was lacking pretty much every ingredient but the eggplant.  Instead, I went with making a pasta sauce to use up both the eggplant and the remainder of the sauce from the eggplant parmesan. 

I started out by sauteing a few cloves of minced garlic in a little oil.  Once they were starting to brown I threw in the chopped up eggplant.  I didn't do anything to them beforehand.  I just chopped them into about 1" pieces, cut off any visibly bruised areas, and threw them in the pan. 

I sauteed the eggplant for maybe 10 minutes.  I wanted to make sure a lot of the moisture was sucked out so the eggplant would maintain its integrity when I dumped in the sauce.  I added about half of a 3lb jar of pasta sauce along with about 1-1/2 tsp capers, 1 tsp red pepper flakes, and 2 tsp oregano.  I'm just kind of guessing with those amounts.  I hate having to take off the little sprinkle cap things on spices to measure them out, so I usually just do a lot of shaking.  There's a whole lot of shaking going on.  Get it?

Along with the spices I threw in some chopped up pepperoni.  It was totally unnecessary, and had Matt told me a week ago that he has never really been a big fan of pepperoni I wouldn't have added it.  But things didn't happen that way, and I had some pepperoni laying around that I wanted to get rid of.  So we had eggplant pepperoni pasta.  

Once everything was in the sauce I started boiling water for the pasta.  The sauce probably cooked for 20 minutes or so - as long as it took to boil the water and cook the pasta.  Then I spooned it into these lovely pasta bowls my grandma gave me (read: she was sick of having them sit around her house), and topped it with some parmesan.  It was pretty tasty, and it was definitely a good use for an aging eggplant.