At its core pasta ala norma is pasta with tomato sauce with a fat dripping twist. Fried eggplant and a bit of parmesan elevate a simple tomato sauce to a whole other level. Thanks Viccy for introducing me to this amazing dish.

Ingredients

• fresh pasta
• 400g canned tomatoes
• 2 garlic cloves
• pepper & salt to taste
• 1 tsp sugar
• some fresh basil
• 1 eggplant
• oil to fry

Instructions

Start by making a basic tomato sauce. Mince the garlic, season the tomatoes with sugar, basil, salt and pepper and let it simmer for about one hour. In the meanwhile cut the eggplant into cubes (ca 1cm sides). Heat up some oil and fry the cubes over low heat until golden brown. This will take a while and depending on how much oil you are using you might want to do this in batches. For me one batch usually takes around 20 minutes. Once done You can either mix the pasta, tomato sauce and fried eggplant cubes and top it of with some parmesan.

Honestly, this dish does not look that amazing on a picture, but it is so worth the while.