No Recipe: Italian Turkey Sausage and Eggplant

With middle age comes the necessity to eat healthier. Which to be honest, blows. Not kacking too early doesn't blow (probably), so it sort of balances out (hopefully). I'm not trained in cooking, nor have I read too many cookbooks. But with age I have somehow gained the ability to throw stuff together out of the frig and pantry and make it come out quite tasty most of the time. Skill or dumb luck, I'm not sure which.

I had a package of Italian turkey sausage in the frig that I bought last week and needed to use or toss. I also had an eggplant I bought yesterday and a bag of red peppers from last week. Turkey is very low calorie. You probably already know that eggplant is a vegetable, not an egg, and I'm supposed to eat more of those, vegetables not eggs. The strangely named eggplant neither looks nor tastes like an egg. As vegetables go, eggplant can be pretty tasty. But that is usually after it has been salted up and fried in oil, which is at cross purposes of eating healthier.

I sliced the smallish eggplant into long thin strips. This was the most time laborious part of the meal preparation. It yielded quite a bit so I left the peppers in the frig. If it hadn't, I would have sliced the peppers into thin strips as well.

My intention was to try to treat the eggplant as though it was pasta. I'm not a big fan of pasta, mostly usually finding it rather boring. Not working in the fields, I don't require the calories of pasta. During one of my cubical enlistments, the company cafeteria had a weekly pasta bar where a guy in a paper chef fat would whip up pasta for you using a pan over a portable propane burner. Rather than boil dried pasta, he would saute up fresh pasta using a little oil.

I heated up a large handled wok-like pan, tossed in the eggplant, drizzling it with a little olive oil. After stir frying that for a little bit, I tossed in the sausage and sprayed the mess with some Pam (for some added oiliness with no calories). I stirred and fried until the eggplant was really soft and the sausages were both cooked through and browned. Time unknown. How ever long that took, it took. Somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes I expect. To my relief the eggplant really did look like wet string, just like cooked pasta.

If I had used the peppers too, I would have cooked them for a bit before adding the eggplant. My uneducated suspicion being that the peppers would take longer to soften.

I had two jars of tomato sauce in the pantry to pick from. I went with Classico Four Cheese. I turned down the heat and dumped the whole jar over the sausage and eggplant. Hey Zeus, the scent of the tomato sauce and the cheese was incredibly appetizing. Maybe eating healthy doesn't have to suck too much. I let that simmer for about a minute or two until the sauce was warmed up, stirring most of the time. I didn't add separately any salt or cheese.

Lunch was two smallish sausages with a little greater volume of eggplant. The combination of sausage, eggplant, and sauce was really tasty. The eggplant made a great medium for the surprisingly tasty jarred sauce. This meal was quick and I believe low calorie and pretty healthy. There is at least enough left for 2 to 4 more servings. Leftovers should microwave nicely and take almost no time to prepare.

I'm sure a nutritionist would recommend having a salad with it as well, but I didn't have any salad stuff in the frig. I do buy salad stuff often but it usually goes before it gets finished.