I just love summer vegetables and as it is slowly becoming fall, I decided to have one last hurrah with summer veggies before they leave.
Simply chop up your veggies and cook. I think the suggested cooking time was a bit much as many of the veggies were basically mush at the end of the cooking. After your veggies are almost fully cooked add your fish on top, cover and let the fish steam for a few minutes.
Bryan ate the fish, but not the vegetables as he finds all summer vegetables disgusting. Oh well. More for me.
Mark Bittman offers a chart on page 588 with more vegetable and pairing suggestions. Bryan will probably love the potatoes with beer and chives. I’ll have to try that next.
The vegetable bed is actually a ratatouille, which is a Provencal vegetable stew. Since it is a stew, the texture of the veg. is somewhere between tender and mushy. The cooking time is not really excessive long - 20 to 32 minutes. Comparing with the recipe in Better Homes and Garden, in which the cooking time is 15 minutes, it seems reasonable because BHG uses 1/2" cubes eggplant comparing with 1" cubes here. Incidently, this procedure of cooking Ratatouille should go in the Stove top ratatouille recipe at the bottom of page 373. The adjustments to the recipe in p. 373 are: 1)Cut the Oven-Bake Recipe in half, and 2)Cut the eggplants into cubes instead of 1/2" slices. Paul.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this recipe again, I believe that the onions were probably burned just like the one in the recipe tomatos in stewed tomatillos (p. 359). The onions got "dry" cooked too long while cooking the eggplants. A better way is as follows. Step 1: Add 1/2 tablespoon of oil and cook onions and bell peppers at medium high heat for 5 minutes. Scoop them out and set aside. Step 2: add 1/2 tablespoon of oil and cook eggplants for 5 minutes. Add zucchini and cook another 5 to 10 minutes. Add tomatoes and cook for 5 minutes and then add the onions and bell pepper back in. Step 3: the same as is. The idea here is avoid dry cooking any vegetables longer than when they are soft. But they can go back in as long as there is some liquid in the pan, in this case the juice of the tomatos. Paul.
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