Italian Style Chunky Soup with Eggplants, Peppers, Olives, and Artichokes

Forgive me as I don’t know what to call this. Is it a pasta sauce? A stew? A soup?

It beats me. All I know is my wife called me to tell me it was good – and not to ruin it by putting in more seasonings or cooking it further.

That doesn’t happen much. The fear I’ll ruin something? All the time, but phone calls on how good my recipe turned out? Never.

Here it is – you tell me what it should be called. I was an opportunistic recipe – most of the ingredients were on hand – I had inventoried what we had in stock and only bought the ground beef, Romano cheese, and fire-roasted tomatoes.

• 2 pounds organic grass-fed ground beef.
• Two medium-size eggplant.
• 12 dried sun-dried tomatoes cut up with scissors.
• One can Muir Glen fire roasted tomatoes.
• One can pitted black olives.
• One can artichoke hearts.
• One third jar of four cheese pasta sauce.
• 10 turns of the salt mill
• Pepper.
• Cayenne pepper.
• 1 tablespoon oregano.
• One green pepper.
• One red pepper.
• 2 tablespoons minced garlic
• Three onions.
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• Fresh grated Romano cheese.

I browned the meat in olive oil, salt and the garlic while chopping the veggies and putting them in one by one, stirring as each batch went in. Then I poured the fire-roasted tomatoes and the 1/3rd jar of pasta sauce in. I brought this to a boil, added the remaining ingredients and let it simmer for 2 hours.

I ate covered in fresh grated Romano cheese. It *was* excellent.

It would work fine as a pasta sauce for people who eat pasta – low carbers can just eat it by itself, so feeding the family with disparate diets is doable with this recipe.