Ratatouille

Since the first time I watched the movie Ratatouille, I always wanted to make the dish but not in the traditional way, in the way it was made in the movie by Remy, the rat. Ratatouille is a French provincial stewed vegetable dish traditionally made from tomatoes, onions, garlic, eggplants, zucchinis, bell peppers and herbs like basil and marjoram. I recommend this dish to every vegetarian and to meat lovers as well. If you have not seen the movie Ratatouille, I recommend watching the cooking scenes here.

I learn from Wikipedia (of course) that Remy's take on the traditional Ratatouille was the work of Chef Thomas Keller and later became known as confit byaldi.

Ratatouille

Ingredients

• 1 small eggplant
• 1 orange bell pepper
• 1 zucchini
• 1 yellow squash
• 2 tomatoes
• 1 medium onion
• 1 8oz can of tomato sauce
• garlic
• fresh thyme
• salt and pepper

Cooking Directions

1. Cut the first five ingredients into really thin slices (as with a mandoline) and set aside. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Chop the onion finely. Saute the onion and some garlic in some olive oil until golden. Add the tomato sauce and reduce. Add salt and pepper to taste.
3. Spread the sauce on the bottom of a greased casserole dish. Take a slice of each vegetable and start forming a column. Remember it is an unforgivable crime to mess up with the sequence. If you start with eggplant, zucchini, squash, tomato, bell pepper you have to stick with that sequence forever. Otherwise your food will not have a uniform taste and your dish will be totally ruined. True story.
4. Be creative in decorating your casserole dish with the colorful vegetables. I ended up making a rose with the tomatoes. It just ends being a beautiful dish. Sprinkle some fresh thyme and some salt and pepper on the top. Remember the vegetables are not seasoned. You need to make sure you have enough seasoning in your sauce and on the top. Place a piece of parchment paper on the top and bake in the oven for about 40 minutes. Remove the parchment paper and bake for 10 more minutes.

 

We served it over Israeli couscous seasoned with herbes de provence and garnished it with some soft goat cheese and fresh thyme.

A note to make here is that the numbers and sizes of the vegetables listed above are just what we used, not necessarily what would be best for this dish. If possible, you'd like to have roughly the same number of slices of each vegetable, so that you can continue the sequence in the stacks throughout the entire dish, so choose your relative sizes and numbers of vegetables accordingly.