Eggplant & Tomato Bake served in a glass bowl.

Calling all veggie lovers (and people who like easy meals to cook)! This week’s recipe is destined for you.

From the same Cajun-Creole Cookery book that contained the lovely Green Grape Pie recipe, I found a recipe for Eggplant and Tomato Bake. It’s basically a casserole. This too calls for few ingredients, many of which you may already have in your pantry. You will, however, need a few fresh veggies: eggplant, onion, green pepper and two cups worth of tomatoes.

For the tomatoes, you can use canned and just don’t tell your dinner guests (your secret is safe with me). If anything, using canned tomatoes will save you a little extra prep time. I used canned tomatoes – the fire-roasted kind but that’s because I wasn’t paying attention to the label.

The recipe also calls for two cloves. It doesn’t provide any special treatment for the cloves in the recipe, so I just threw them in whole. If you don’t want to go out of your way for whole cloves, I’m sure using a few shakes of ground cloves would be about the equivalent. Maybe?

Also, the recipe doesn’t say to remove the cloves after cooking the vegetables or before pouring the cooked vegetables into the baking pan. So, I left them in there. However, do consider the eating experience of leaving the whole cloves in there as they are a little harder to find than bay leaves. My first bite after cooking this, unfortunately, contained a whole clove. Imagine taking a sip of water but it’s actually Sprite. It’s that kind of shocking surprise — vegetables but the only flavor is the clove.

What this recipe also lacks is telling the reader what size of baking pan to use. I suppose this was expected knowledge of the early 60s. But to help take some of the guesswork out, the pan I used was an 8- or 9-inch square pan.

Overall, the dish was tasty and is something I would definitely make again but with a few modifications, such as adding red pepper flakes and garlic. We add garlic to pretty much everything cooked in my house.

EGGPLANT AND TOMATO BAKE

1 eggplant

2 cups cooked tomatoes

1 green pepper (chopped)

1 onion (chopped)

1 tablespoon brown sugar

3 tablespoons flour

3 tablespoons butter (melted)

½ bay leaf

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

½ cup breadcrumbs

2 cloves

Dice eggplant. Cook 12 minutes in boiling salted water. Drain and place in buttered baking dish. Blend butter and flour. Add vegetables, salt, brown sugar, bay leaf and cloves to butter mixture. Cook for 10 minutes. Pour over eggplant. Cover with breadcrumbs and dot with butter. Bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees F.) for about 40 minutes. Serves 6. (Squash may be used in this recipe instead of eggplant.)