meatless monday: phenomenal eggplant tomato pie

I have ingredients, and then I get hungry and realize I forgot to cook. Except for a few days ago, when things started falling out of the freezer and I said, "oh, I remember making that...", like the mini pizzas I made from frozen dinner rolls.

Tonight's dinner comes from the Penzey's Spices catalogue; alas, I don't know which one, as I ripped the page out and stuffed it into my recipe binder. It was submitted to the spice catalogue by Emily Guertin of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who says "This is a tasty breakfast, lunch, or light dinner!"

It is, essentially, a quiche, and this, with fresh produce coming in and farmer's markets everywhere, the perfect time to make it. An easier to follow set of directions than mine can be found at Penzey's web site for Phenomenal Eggplant and Tomato Pie. I assume the provided nutrition information includes the made from scratch pie crust recipe included...?

I added onion and a small sweet red pepper to this pie that magically appeared on my doorstep. It's that time of year.

• This calls for 3 eggs, which are inside the container of milk, which, as luck would have it, contained *exactly* the right amount of liquid for the recipe. So I threw it all in there and danced around the kitchen to some music and shook the container instead of beating it with a fork. Way more fun. I chopped all the veggies as directed, and then I quartered my eggplant just because I dislike fighting with my food when I'm trying to cut it later.  

add the tomato to the eggplant for the second roasting and toss.

"divide and conquer" into equal portions for layering into the pie

sprinkle on the Parmesan cheese

I don't have the Tuscan Sunset spice blend, so I made something up consisting of basil, parsley, salt, black pepper, onion and an Italian salad sprinkle spice blend.

and some extra parm cheese. unless you're allergic, you can never go wrong with a smidgen extra cheese. I'm still inside the 1/4 cup recipe guide lines. 

into the oven to bake for 30 minutes. I did go back and wrap foil around the crust.

since the recipe calls for 1/2 a medium eggplant, and I didn't want to waste a hot oven, I sliced up the whole eggplant, and roasted the rest to use for eggplant parm later [trying to go lower cal with out the breading and frying] and a yellow squash that magically appeared in our unlocked car at church... it also meant that I got some extra mileage out of the olive oil left on the pan from the previous roastings!

some more info on the phenomenal eggplant tomato pie:

Prep. time: 35 minutes including baking of eggplant/tomato slices (+ 20 minutes if making pie crust) 
Cooking time: 30-40 minutes 
Serves: 8 

Nutritional Information:
Servings 8; Serving Size 1 piece (97g); Calories 200; Calories from fat 120; Total fat 14g; Cholesterol 100mg; Sodium 350mg; Carbohydrate 15g; Dietary Fiber 1g.

more importantly, was this tasty? would I make it again??

Yes. This was pretty tasty, although a little time consuming - I would plan ahead and buy a pie crust next time insead of going a la scratch