Eggplant has nothing to do with eggs - unless you dip and bread them. This sauce is a knockout! We grow 'Casper', an heirloom small, long white eggplant. It's mild in flavor and perfectly suited to thick, rich vegetable sauces.
When cut into dime-to-quarter-sized disks, I have found Casper to be a perfect addition to other late summer produce. So I developed the following sauce for pasta and rice dishes. It is also perfectly delicious on toast points as an appetizer, even as a side dish.. It may remind you of a ratatouille puttanesca, or any number of other combinations - but I would urge you to give this recipe a try. Whatever you want to call it - it is very delicious!
While you may not grow or have Farmer's Market access to Casper, you may find that another variety of small, or baby eggplant will carry this recipe well. I have also had great success with baby Japanese eggplants as a vehicle for this recipe. However, I will be increasing our crop of Casper next year! Casper is now haunting the "what else can I make" section of my mind.
We do make our own Roma tomato sauce base, which, like your canned, diced tomatoes, needs to be reduced. It is also not our custom here to drown any pasta dish in sauce, which happens all too frequently, but to coat and bring flavor to the pasta.
But right now, let's make a winning multi-purpose sauce.