Is sauce and imitation meatstuff best prepared from scratch? Sure. But what this blog endeavors at times to represent is delicious, plant-based meals that are doable on a weeknight after work. To that end, you could just cook the chicken and serve it over sauce’n’pasta. But what if you wanted to show some folks who’s boss? What if you wanted to say to those people who claim nightshades cause inflammation and what all else that you don’t just want tomato sauce—you want eggplants and peppers and caramelized onion and garlic (the latter two of which are not nightshades but I’ve been told they’re avoided by certain adherents of Jainism, though not because they cause inflammation).

Onion, eggplant slivers salted and sweated (sweat?) for half an hour and patted dry, chilis, garlic, tomato sauce, corn starch, nutritional yeast, fusilli, chick’n. Not-pictured ingredients are vegetable stock and balsamic vinegar.

I’ll take this opportunity to say that a trash bowl is a great idea. Diced onion, seeds left on chilis cuz spicy things are great.

Caramelized the onion in olive oil for a decent while or two. Then added chilis.

After the chilis softened I added the eggplant, then the garlic.

To stop the garlic cooking after fragrant I added the chick’n.

This looks awfully much like chicken. I ended up having to reheat it later due to poor timing.

This dish would have been pretty excellent without adding a jar of sauce, but I already took a picture of the sauce in the first shot and I won’t be made a liar. The eggplant/chili/onion/garlic mix was incorporated into the sauce, and I also added some nutritional yeast and balsamic vinegar.

I thinned the sauce with vegetable stock and thickened it back up with cornstarch and heat. This gives the whole texture a more SpaghettiO’s vibe but I also find it keeps better as leftovers in terms of drying out. Chick’n re-sauteed to get it warm and juicy.