Description: Simple and tasty. Without tomato or cream sauce, pasta still can be amazing and delicious. Onions can give a nice sweet taste to this pasta. Because this pasta has no thick sauce, you can enjoy the taste of each vegetable.
Serves: 2
Cooking time: 25 minutes

Ingredients

• Garlic – chopped, 4 cloves
• Aubergine – 2 piece or 400g
• Bacon – chopped, 4 rashers or 80g
• Onion – thinly sliced, 70g
• Olive oil – 1 tablespoon
• Salt – 2 dashes
• Ground black pepper – ½ teaspoon
• Chive – chopped, 2 tablespoons
• White wine – 100 mL
• Parmesan cheese – 10g

Method

1. Cook the spaghetti until al dente in plenty of boiling water with salt.
2. Meanwhile, heat the extra virgin olive oil in a large non-stick frying pan, then add the garlic, bacon and onion over low heat, stirring regularly.
3. Add the aubergine, 50 mL water, salt and black pepper, change the heat to medium then close the lid to cook. Once the water has evaporated, add the wine and close the lid again.
4. Add the hot drained pasta to the frying pan. Mix well.

5. Sprinkle black pepper, chive and parmesan cheese on top before serving.

To serve: Sprinkle additional ground black pepper.

Nutritional Values Per Serving

Kcal	Protein	Fat	Carbs	Fibre	Sugars	Salt	Saturated Fat	Vitamin B3
564.0	20.9g	19.9g	70.1g	70.1g	10.3g	1.6g	4.5g	6.5mg
28.2%	41.7%	28.4%	27.0%	31.3%	11.5%	26.6%	22.7%	49.7%

Nutritional Tips

I think this is a fibre-rich pasta. As I already explained in another recipe, fibre is one of the important nutrients to our body. Aubergine is rich in fibre, vitamin B6, potassium and magnesium, and also contains some vitamin B1 and vitamin B3. It contains also low carb, fat and calories (it is only 25 kcal for 100g). Aubergine adds volume to the dish so it would make our stomach fuller. This pasta may look plain, but some secret ingredients (onion) can give a bit of sweet flavour to the pasta. So without a cream or tomato sauce, you still can enjoy this pasta and feel the original vegetable tastes. I believe that a good point of cooking non-sauce pasta (cream sauce/tomato sauce) is that you can actually enjoy the ingredients on their own instead of just feeling the dominant taste of the sauce.

Aubergine is also known as a high number of antioxidants carrier. Antioxidants help protect our body from free radicals (Azuma et al, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2008 Nov 12;56(21):10154-9 ). Free radicals are known as unstable atoms which lack electrons around the atoms (electrons like to be in pairs). In our body, when oxygen molecules split into single atoms that have unpaired electrons, they become unstable free radicals. Because of that, they try to fill other electrons in or bond to other molecules by reacting in our body, which causes damage to cells, proteins and DNA. If this keeps happening, a process of “oxidative stress” starts within the body.

Human body cells can be damaged by oxidative stress, causing diseases such as cancer, atherosclerosis and Alzheimer’s. It is believed that antioxidants donate these electrons to make free radicals more stable while not becoming free radicals themselves. I will not go into this in-depth here today, but there is also an opposing theory in which antioxidants might become pro-oxidants (which grab electrons from other molecules).

These antioxidants are included in peels, so I suggest not removing the skin for cooking and eating them all to maximise the benefit from aubergines 🙂