Baked Norma

Bellini's opera, Norma, is about a pagan priestess who kills herself having discovered that her Roman soldier lover has betrayed her. Fun. Luckily, pasta alla Norma contains no pagans or Romans, and was named solely thanks to the coincidence that both Bellini and this pasta dish are from Sicily. I hear roasted pagan can be a little tough and tasteless. 

This recipe takes the best bits of pasta alla Norma, i.e., everything except the pasta, and then bakes it in the oven until it's all melting together, before dunking garlic bread into it. The ricotta salata is borderline essential. Normal ricotta, feta, or a hard cheese like pecorino can be used instead, but you will get a very different flavour and Sicilians would definitely look down their noses at you.

It's worth knowing that M&S do mini garlic baguettes, ideally sized for the singleton kitchen. Of course, they cost the same as one of Tesco's normal-sized ones, but they really are rather good. Particularly so if you are incapable of not eating the whole of a garlic baguette anyway.


Baked Norma

First, make your tomato sauce:

1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp sugar
red wine
250g tomato passata
salt and pepper

Fry the onion and garlic in a generous glug of olive oil, over a medium heat, for 20 minutes or so, until softened. Add the oregano and sugar, and turn the heat up so that the onions start to caramelise around their edges.

Add a very generous glug of red wine, and reduce until it's almost non-existent. Tip in the passata and check the seasoning: it will want plenty of salt and pepper, and may want some more sugar, too. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, roast the aubergine. Chop a whole aubergine into one-and-a-half inch cubes, pour over a decent (by which I mean indecent) amount of oil, and toss together until the cubes are well-coated. Roast for 30 minutes at 200 degrees celsius.

Tip the aubergine into the tomato sauce and combine. Then grate over 50g or so of ricotta salata, and pop back in the oven to bake for 10 minutes. The cheese should have browned slightly on top; it won't melt so don't worry about that.

Leave to cool for five minutes, unless you want to remove half the skin off the roof of your mouth, and then dunk in some crusty garlic bread.