New Recipe 2 – Melanzane Alla Parmigiana

Last night I made my second new Slimming World recipe of the year, and it was an instant hit! Melanzane Alla Parmigiana is one of my favourite Italian dishes, and it’s been something I’ve been meaning to try out for a while. This recipe is a combination of a few recipes I’ve found, made Slimming World friendly. I have salted the aubergines in the recipe, as I find I get better results this way and I had the time to do it, however if you don’t want to do this, I suspect it would still be nice if you skipped this step!

Ingredients
(Serves 4, 0 syns if using cheese as HEXA)
3 cans chopped tomatoes
3 garlic cloves
3 aubergines
1 large onion
1 red chilli
large handful fresh basil
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp sweetener
180g mozzarella
Handful of cherry tomatoes
Method

1. Finely slice the aubergines length wise, around 5mm thick. Rub over some salt and leave in a colander for around an hour to get rid of the excess water.
2. Meanwhile, make the tomato sauce. Finely dice the onion, garlic and chilli, and fry until soft with some fry light.
3. Remove and reserve the basil leaves, and finely slice the basil stalks.
4. Add the basil stalks and chopped tomatoes to the frying pan, along with the balsamic and sweetener.
5. Cook the tomato sauce for around half an hour until thickened, and season to taste. Stir in the basil leaves.
6. When the aubergines are ready, rinse the salt off in fresh cold running water and squeeze out any moisture before drying on some kitchen roll or a tea towel.
7. Using a griddle pan, lightly brown the aubergine on each side (you will need to do this in batches)
8. Using a large casserole dish, layer up the ingredients – start with some tomato sauce, then some aubergine then crumble over some of the mozzarella. Repeat until all the ingredients are used up.
9. Top it off with halved cherry tomatoes and some black pepper.
10. Bake in the oven at 170 degrees, for around 30-35 minutes, and serve.