I first slapped on a mid-seventies Tom Waits album onto the CD player, which with its world -weary jazz rumblings immediately gave the kitchen the atmosphere of a prohibition era nightclub; the perfect setting for creative cookery.
The first step was skinning and cutting the Aubergine into small cubes and then soaking this much maligned vegetable in salty water. The process of soaking the Aubergine pieces allows them to lose their naturally bitter taste. Soaking them for an hour will do the trick. Meanwhile I weighed out one and three quarter pounds of tomatoes and then dropped them into a pan of boiling water for ten minutes. This is the lazy (sensible) way of peeling your tomatoes as the skins are sweated off their flesh during the boiling.
While I waited for my Aubergines to finish soaking and the tomatoes cooled down on the chopping board I took on the challenge of making wholemeal pastry for the pie. I'm usually reasonably decent at making pastry but for some reason wholemeal pastry is a real challenge. I find that no matter how much you add extra flour or milk to bind the ingredients together you always have to roll it out in several pieces and stick it together to put in the pie dish jigsaw puzzle style. After much shouting, kneading and rolling the pastry was finally in a presentable shape and I was able to line the bottom of a greased pie dish with it.
As the pastry preparation was a long drawn out task it was pretty much time to continue making the filling. I first dried the Aubergine pieces with a paper towel and then fried them on the hob in a casserole dish once they had started to brown I threw in the skinless tomatoes (having cut off their tops) and proceeded to squash them into a homemade tomato puree. To make the filling a bit more tasteful I added in a liberal dose of Paprika, Black Pepper and Basil once these were all mixed together I felt I was getting somewhere judging by the smells from the kitchen wafting through the house.
The kidney beans were all that was needed to finish things off. A can of kidney beans will do for this recipe as fresh beans need soaking in water for a nearly a day which is okay if a) you're retired b)you're unemployed or c) you are rich enough to afford your own personal chef. If however you are like the rest of us and need to have time to hold down a day job then canned beans are the way to go.
The beans are dropped into the casserole dish with the Aubergines, Tomatoes and seasoning and mixed thoroughly and heated through. Once they've been cooked for ten minutes you're ready to put the pie together. First pour the mixture into the bottom of the pie dish and then roll your remaining pastry out to cover the mixture up. If you have the same ability to make wholemeal pastry as me you will be making the pastry lid out several pieces stuck together rather than one perfectly rolled seamless piece.
The temperature to cook this one on is 165 degrees on a fan oven or 175 degrees for a normal oven. You should also stick a sheet of foil over the top of the pie to cover it. To finish off matters the pie should be cooked for 38 minutes and then you need to take it out of oven, remove the foil and cook it for a further 12 minutes.
The verdict
After fifty minutes of cooking I removed my pie from the oven to find that some of the Tomato and Basil sauce had oozed out of it but other than that things had gone to plan. The taste of the filling is one of the best of any meat free pie I have tasted. The fresh Tomatoes and Basil are always a winner and the Paprika and Pepper give a taste to the otherwise bland vegetable that is the Aubergine. The Kidney Beans and the Aubergine blend together to give the pie much needed body that would normally be provided by meat and my DIY approach to making wholemeal pastry ensured that the pie stayed in one piece during cooking.
On its own this pie probably wouldn't be enough so to give the meal a bit of range I stir-fried Red Pepper, Red Onion and Garlic with some of the spare Tomato and Basil sauce. This made a useful accompaniment to the pie as it is of a similar consistency and taste to the pie's filling.
