This dish is a combination of two recipes, one cooked with eggplant and tomato sauce with cumin but no lasagna and a lasagna recipe with eggplant and tomato sauce but no cumin, both from “183 Φρέσκιες Ιδέες” by Κρίστια Μαυροειδή. It was an experiment and it came out good.

Recipe

Ingredients (for 6 pieces)

• 1 big eggplant
• 7 slices of bacon
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, chopped
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• 1 big can crushed tomatoes
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 cup of grated Parmesan
• 6 no cook lasagna noodles
• 1/2 cup evaporated milk
• 1 egg

How to make: Oil or aluminum foil a flat pan. Wash the eggplant, slice it out in rounds, place the round pieces on the pan, brush with olive oil and cook in a 480F/250C oven for about 30 minutes or until soft. Cook the bacon in a pan and lay the cooked slices on a paper towel and crumble it when it’s cool. In the bacon fat, saute the onion, garlic and green pepper.  Add the  crushed or diced tomatoes, cumin, sugar and pepper. Cook the tomato sauce for about twenty minutes.  In a small size pyrex (big enough to fit six pieces, see photo),   lay three  no-cook lasagna noodles (or enough to cover the  bottom). Add,  in this order, layers of eggplant slices, tomato sauce with bacon bits, grated Parmesan, another three lasagna noodles, remaining eggplant, tomato sauce and grated Parmesan.  Beat the egg with the evaporated milk and pour it on top. Cook in 390F/200C oven for about half an hour. As you can see in the photo below, I overcooked mine by about 5-7  minutes.

Notes and tips: This is the first time I’ve cooked no-cook lasagna. They were fine and a great time saver.  No-cook lasagna means you don’t have to boil them first before you start making layers. They are available in most super-markets. The ones I used were the length of my pyrex and wider than 1/3 of the width of the pyrex, which means that the three lasagna noodles I used per layer were overlapping. If you can’t find them, use regular lasagna, instead, cooked according to package instructions.