Ratpatootie

Can you guess what I made from looking at this picture (and ignoring the post title)?



I made ratatouille!

It was sooooo good. I was thinking about the movie Ratatouille and I wondered what exactly was in ratatouille. I googled it, then looked in the fridge and it just so happened that I had everything needed to make it. (Everything minus red wine, but I figured I was close enough.)

To start, sauté onions and green peppers in olive oil. I only sautéed mine long enough to make them a little transparent because I'm ridiculously impatient, but they would probably taste fantastic if I'd browned them.



I then threw in Italian parsley and garlic and about 3/4 of a jar of sauce. Heat that up a little bit and then throw about a cup of the yumminess in the bottom of a baking dish.



That looks good enough to eat on its own...

Slice an eggplant, green zucchini and yellow zucchini. I had the world's biggest zucchinis, so only used about a third of them. I chopped and froze the rest and I kid you not, the remainder filled five baggies. I could feed a 3rd world country for a month with the zucchini in my freezer.



Toss the sliced veggies in the pot with the sauce and heat it for about ten minutes. Now, I actually put the eggplant in first for about five minutes because it takes a little longer to soften up than the zucchini. So, the eggplant got ten minutes and the zucchini got five.



Slice up your tomatoes (as many as you'd like) and grab the baking dish. Layer the slices of veggies and tomatoes in the dish and pour the remainder of the sauce over the top. I think I then cooked it for about 40 minutes at 350. You could leave it in there for an hour if you have the kind of self-control that I am obviously lacking.



Yumm. Yumm. Yumm. Grab a big scoop of it and sprinkle some parmesan on top. I intended to eat it over rice but realized I didn't have any as I was boiling the water for it. I went for garlic bread instead, which I feel ended up being an excellent choice.



I think this would also taste amazing as a real stew or over chicken, pasta, a piece of cardboard, anything remotely digestible by the human body. As a little bonus it's also a seriously easy and delicious vegetarian meal. You could even make it vegan if you left off the parmesan, but really? Why would you want to do that?