Whole-Wheat Penne with Eggplant-Tomato Sauce

Not only filling, but my 'meat and potato' men didn't realize it was all vegetables! Absolutely a 'do again' recipe

Nice that this cooks slowly in the crock pot-good to leave it for my husband and daughter to eat after I've done all the hard prep work. My daughter favorite food is spaghetti so she loved this and I loved that I was able to get some good veggies in her. I had diced canned tomatoes instead of the crushed so I added 4 cans of 14 oz diced tomatoes and used my potato smasher to semi crush them, and drained them. We like a lot of tomatoes in our sauce so the extra tomatoes made it nice and yummy. Since I added extra tomatoes I did add 2nd clove of garlic. A good meal for leftovers.

I made a few additions to this recipe- 1 small can of tomato paste, 1 T italian seasoning and 1 lb of hot Italian sausage (cooked and drained). I skipped the pasta and baked it casserole style with spaghetti squash and mozzarella. My husband loved it, went back for seconds and even took the leftovers for lunch! The sauce was not as smooth as I thought it might be, so I would recommend either using a food processor, blender or immersion blender to smooth it out before serving.