Involtini

I had never heard of Involtini til a friend posted a link to the recipe. They had it for dinner and she shared that it was delicious. As soon as I clicked on the link, I knew my Italian husband would love it.

It was so totally awesome and the best part is  ..

Well, there are two best parts, if you’ll allow me to say “two best parts”!  🙂

First, there’s no meat and every now and then, I just need to serve a meatless dish just to say I did it!

Second, there’s enough left over for us to have three more meals! Even though it was a bit of work, getting four meals from one dish is a tremendous time (and mess) saver.

If you click on the link above, you’ll see the original recipe. Since I made some changes, I’m going to share my recipe. Since I’d never heard of Involtini, the changes I’ve made may have caused it to be totally no longer “Involtini” but we loved it and I think you would too . . if you like eggplant. Here are the basic changes I made:

1. The peelings are left on the eggplant in the recipe but who wants those? I peeled the eggplant and it was more fragile but it worked.
2. Because I do not like raisins at all, once I got most of the ingredients into the filling, I used the immersion blender to blend and chop and totally disguise the raisins.
3. Slivers of fresh basil were added to the filling and to the sauce.
4. Italian herbs were added to both the filling and the sauce.
5. Instead of dumping drained, canned tomatoes on top, I made a creamy sauce.

The most time consuming part was rolling up the eggplant with the filling but that surely wasn’t hard!

This is what it looks like before spreading the tomato topping over it all. There were just a few spoonfuls of filling left over so I spread those on top of the rolls.

Since I’m not much of a fan of red sauce, adding the cream helped me love this dish.

In the sauce shown above, everything was mixed in except the onions and I was just about to mix those in.

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