Tag: fall

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The Book Vegetables

192. Baked Breaded Acorn Squash p.579


The recipe

Here’s a very simple and quite cool looking preparation for acorn squash. All you do is mix bread crumbs, thyme, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Melt butter in another bowl, and dip slices of acorn squash first into the butter, then coat with the bread crumb mixture. You then bake the squash slices for about 20 minutes.

The Good: I wouldn’t have guessed that acorn squash and thyme had such an affinity for one another, that was a very pleasant surprise indeed. Baked bread crumb toppings are generally good things, and this was no exception.

The Bad: I didn’t have any regular bread crumbs, and decided panko would be an acceptable substitute. I didn’t consider that because panko is so much lighter and has much more surface area than regular dry bread crumbs, it cooked much faster. When the recipes recommended 20 minutes in the over were up my bread crumbs were starting to burn so I had no choice but to pull the squash out. Unfortunately the interiors of the squash were still quite firm. I had to nuke the squash to get it to soften up. The bread crumb topping survived the trip through the microwave better than I would have expected though.

The Verdict: While the panko substitution was my fault, the cooking time for this recipe was too short, and that’s The Book’s fault. The flavours were excellent, and it was a very simple way to make an impressive looking side dish. I’ll certainly be making this again, but I’ll stick a little closer to the instructions next time.

Categories
Soups The Book

162. Onion Soup Gratinée p.114

I can’t find a recipe for this soup online.

Typically onion soup is a socially acceptable excuse for sitting down to half a pound of melted cheese. Trying to maneuver those long strands of gooey cheese into ones mouth without getting it all over your front is a social bonding experience best shared with close friends. If you ask people what they like about onion soup they’ll probably say it’s the cheese. This recipe takes the radical position that the cheese is just getting in the way of a really good soup.

This recipe uses the Beef Stock from last time as its main ingredient, along with caramelized onions, vermouth, a bouquet garni, cognac, and Worchestershire sauce. It’s topped with toasted baguette slices, and a thin layer of grated Gruyère and Parmigiano-Reggiano, then popped under the broiler for a bit. The end result is a nice onion soup, but it’s lacking in the cheese department. I agree that sometimes the cheese can be overwhelming, but half the joy of onion soup is the melty strands of cheese that come up with every bite. The soup itself was a little heavy on the booze and Worchestershire sauce, and not as onion flavoured as I would have liked. As I mentioned last time, making the stock for the dish was a big pain, and didn’t have a great pay-off. It was a perfectly fine basis for the soup, but it was hardly better than the store bought stuff.

While I enjoyed my dinner, there are better onion soup recipes out there. My dining companion makes French onion soup often enough, it takes her twenty minutes, and tastes far better than this all day affair.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

160. Cranberry Walnut Tart p.786


The recipe

Cooking is a learning process, and a lot of lessons just need to be learned the hard way. There are a host of excellent kitchen habits that food educators are desperate for us to get into, such as, reading the recipe all the way through, verifying that you have all the ingredients, doing things that can be done ahead ahead, getting your mise en place, and cleaning as you go. These are wonderful, labour saving, better for you in the long run, habits. Unfortunately it takes a fiasco for me to really internalize any of those teachings.

Today’s lesson was “Don’t assume, you’ll make an ass out of u and me”. I’d already learned the read the recipe all the way through lesson, so it was time to screw up the checking that you have all the ingredients you think you have step. I made a special trip to the grocery store to get the stuff for this tart, and picking up corn syrup wouldn’t have been a problem, but I took it on faith that somewhere in the depths of the pantry a sticky bottle of light corn syrup was waiting for me. I was wrong, in a two cook household you can never trust that the pantry fairies haven’t come along and wiped you out of cream of tartar. For the record, acceptable substitutions for 1 cup of light corn syrup are 1 cup of dark corn syrup, 1 cup of treacle, 1 cup of liquid glucose, 1 cup of honey, or 1 cup of granulated white sugar (increase the liquid in the recipe by 1/4 cup). You’ll notice that 1 cup of maple syrup is not on that list. I knew that I should really make a simple syrup as a stand in, and two seconds of googling would have turned me on to honey, but I went with maple syrup because I’d failed to heed the “do what can be done ahead ahead” lesson, and the guests were coming much sooner than I was ready for.

For this tart I baked off a batch of Sweet Pastry Dough, then whisked together eggs, brown sugar, maple syrup instead of corn syrup, butter, salt, and vanilla, then stirred in chopped walnuts and cranberries which i forgot to chop (I was frazzled). I baked it for half of the recommended 45 minutes because it was starting to burn.

Part of the filling boiled over the sides of the pan and onto the bottom of the oven, and some got between the crust and the tart pan. That left a lot less filling in the actual pie shell, so it began to dry out. Maybe if I’d chopped the cranberries as as I was supposed to they would have released more juice, and kept the caramel saucy. The pie was really sticky and thick, hard to cut, hard to eat, and didn’t taste all that great. The cranberry-walnut-caramel combination should have been a winner, and it might well have been if I’d followed the recipe properly. The people on Epicurious seem to like it well enough.

As a pie this really wasn’t great, but it worked out well as a life lesson. Today I learned that just because I’ve had an ingredient at some point doesn’t mean I still have it. I’ve also started to think about organizing the pantry so that it makes some kind of sense. In future, if the cook’s note at the bottom says that the recipe can me made a day in advance, I’ll consider availing myself of that. Sometimes it takes several painful repetitions for a lesson to sink in, but I’m begining to appreciate the fact that the Gods of pastry aren’t shy about smiting those who play fast and loose with the recipe. I always feel bad when I give a recipe a poor rating when it was at least partially my fault, but too bad, The Book doesn’t actually have feelings that I can hurt. I give my performance as a cook here 1/5 mushrooms, but the tart fares a bit better.

Categories
Poultry The Book

159. Duck Legs and Carrots p.398


The recipe is from Fergus “Nose To Tail” Henderson’s London restaurant, St. John.

My dining companion and I adore duck, and eat it often, so a new preparation is always exciting for us. I really like the thinking behind this recipe. It takes an underused part of the duck, and brings out its absolute best. Incidentally duck legs are a wonderful bargain, they’re exceedingly flavorful and they’re nicely inexpensive. Duck breasts and fattened livers are worth their weight in gold, but that means that there are a lot of legs hanging around, and there’s only so much demand for duck confit. There’s loads of duck produced in Quebec, so it’s always easy to find.

In this recipe duck legs are trimmed of excess fat, and that fat is rendered in a skillet. The legs are seasoned with salt and pepper, and browned in batches. Most of the fat is then discarded from the skillet and a mixture of chopped leeks, onions, and garlic are softened. A truckload of sliced carrots are then added to the pan and cooked for a few minutes. The veg is then seasoned with salt and pepper, and spread in the bottom of a roasting pan. A bouquet garni of parsley, rosemary, and bay leaves is added to the veg, along with a jalapeño. The duck breasts are then nestled on top of the carrots, and chicken stock is added until it covers most of the legs, but the skin is left exposed to the direct heat of the oven. The dish is then baked at 400 for an hour and half-ish. The duck and carrots are served with the defatted juices on the side.

I was really pleased with what this preparation did for the duck. The meat was falling off the bone tender, and perfectly braised, while the all important skin was cracklingly crisp. The meat gave up some of its goodness to the surrounding liquid, but it has flavour to spare, and it benefited from the arromatic infusion. I would happily eat this duck again and again, but I’d leave the carrots off the plate. Carrots braised for an hour and a half are well in to mushy territory, and there were a lot of them. Everyone at dinner was going back for seconds on the potatoes and Brussels sprouts, but the bowl of carrots was mostly ignored. It actually tasted pretty good, but the texture was just not appealing. I’d leave the carrots in the kitchen when you make this, and turn them into the basis for a lovely carrot soup the next day. The duck legs, and accompanying pan juices were an excellent centerpiece to the meal, and the carrots were a worthy sacrifice, in this case the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.

I liked this dish on a lot of levels, first off, the flavour was fantastic, the duck meat was heightened by the arromatic infusion, and the skin had the almost but not quite too rich quality of bacon. The meat was fork tender, and the skin perfectly crisp. I also loved the concept here, it’s a really simple and smart way to bring out the best of duck, with tender meat and crispy skin, all in one go. If the vegetables had been less done, it would have been a conceptual trifecta, and a perfect little symbiotic ecosystem. As it was I wasn’t quite sure what to do with fourteen carrots and two leeks worth of mush, and I didn’t think of making soup at the time. I turned some of it into a middling pasta sauce. As a standalone the duck and pan juices would earn about 4.5 mushrooms, but the carrots are dragging the rating for the whole dish down.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

158. Perciatelli with Sausage Ragù and Meatballs p.222

I can’t find the recipe for this one online, but you can easily fake it. Last time I gave you the recipe for the life changingly good meatballs used in this recipe and they’re by far the most important part.

I mentioned that I’d be putting those meatballs up against one of the boys’ version of a Sicilian meatball. In the end we did have a meatball battle, but I have no time for looking backwards, so I chose a recipe from the book I hadn’t made yet as my contender. I went with Meatballs in Tomato Sauce, which were very traditional, and basic. There was some mention in the comments that currants, pine nuts, and sweet spices might not be appealing meatball ingredients to everyone, and the battle proved this out. I quite liked his take on the Sicilian meatball, and it was my pick for the battle winner. I’m not sure who won, or who actually voted, or whether anyone was keeping track, but my simple meatballs gathered their share of votes. The reasons given were mostly that people didn’t like some flavour in the Sicilian meatballs though. To each their own.

In this recipe the Sicilian meatballs, and sweet Italian sausages are browned in a large pot. The meat is removed and onions are softened in the remaining oil, then garlic is added and cooked for a couple of minutes. Red wine, a bay leaf, tomato paste and purée are added to the pot, and the meat is nestled back in. The ragù is left to simmer for an hour and a half. Five minutes before serving, frozen green peas are stirred in. The meat is then removed, and some of the sauce is tossed with cooked perciatelli or ridged penne and served. The Book says that traditionally the pasta would be served as a first course, and the sausage and meatballs as a second, but in this recipe the meat is piled on the pasta and served.

I was quite pleased with the sauce, especially because it was infused with the flavours of the meatballs and sausages. The sauce was rich and wonderfully aromatic, and the red wine helped it surpass a standard spaghetti sauce. I like peas in pasta sauces, especially when the pasta’s shape lets them hide inside, and in such a deeply flavoured slow simmered dish their bright freshness was especially welcome. For all the goodness of the sauce, the highlight was really the meatballs, the sausages were entirely forgettable. I used bog standard grocery store Italian sausages, which are always fine, and sometimes pretty darn good, but maybe using a better quality product would have been worth it in this case. I wasn’t happy with the lewd appearance the sausages and meatballs gave the dish, and it’s hard to cut up a sausage when it’s sitting on a pile of pasta. If I used sausage again I’d definitely slice it ahead of time, and toss it with the pasta. I know I’ve said it enough at this point, but by far the best part of the recipe was the meatballs, and it was hard to care about any of the rest of it when they were on the plate.

I was altogether happy with this dish. I especially liked that the cinnamon from the meatballs perfused the tomato sauce. In Quebec cinnamon in spaghetti sauce is very very common, and I grew up on it. It doesn’t appear to be all that popular in the English speaking bits of North America, so I’m pleased to see that this winner of a flavour combination made it into The Book somewhere. Between making the meatballs and simmering the sauce this recipe takes forever, but it’s ideal for chilly days with pouring rain, or snowstorms. This ragù was wonderfuly warming and comforting, if I’d been out skiing all day this is exactly the dish I’d want waiting for me when I got home.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

150. Pumpkin Apple Bread p.599


The recipe courtesy of The Amateur Gourmet

A loaf is a dangerous thing. It hardly ever occurs to me to bake up some banana bread, or a lemon loaf. If you asked me to name my favourite desserts, no loaf would make the list. I don’t think about them, or go out of my way to get them, but the second a sweet cakey loaf comes out of the oven, I’m lost.

The insatiable craving that takes hold isn’t a conscious one. I have a slice with an espresso, dining companion and I chat about how nice it is, then I get on with my day. About half an hour later, I find myself back in the kitchen with the knife in my hand, and another reasonably sized slice on my plate. After all, it really is better when it’s fresh. I trick myself into the next slice with a lie about pumpkin and apples making it a healthy snack. It gets worse from there, I probably won’t have any appetite for dinner, and my dining companion may not get a second slice. These types of loaves are a triumph of marketing. They’re not cake, they’re bread! and look! they’re full of healthy fruits and nuts! At least a black-forest cake is honest, if you eat it for breakfast you know exactly what a bad person you are.

This particular temptress is made by sifting together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice in one bowl, canned pumpkin, oil, sugar, and eggs in another, and then adding the dry stuff to the wet stuff, and folding in chopped apples. The batter is divided between two loaf pans, sprinkled with the inevitable streusel topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter), and baked.

This bread is about as autumnal as it gets. Think pumpkin pie, now with carbs! If you’re a fan of the pie, this is the bread for you. Being in the house while it baked was a pleasure. Someone should distill it into a perfume. The bread was exceptionally moist, with a loose spongy crumb, and the barest hint of toothsomeness. The chunks of Granny Smith added a necessary textural counterpoint, and a little bit of bite to keep things in perspective. This topping worked better than some of The Book’s other efforts. In this case it was a flavourful glaze on the loaf, and not the overwhelming mess that sometimes results. I might toss in some crushed walnuts or pecans next time, but as it is it’s a winner

If you’re the sort of person who has a modicum of self control when it comes to baked goods in the house, I happily recommend this bread. For those of you who don’t, bake it and give it away, at least you’ll be able to enjoy the way your kitchen smells. Unfortunately I tried the second strategy, and for possibly the first time in human history a lab full of grad students was too busy to polish off free baking on the first go-round. I ended up with a third of a loaf on my desk for the afternoon, I’m not at liberty to say what happened next.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

147. Butternut Squash, Sage, and Goat Cheese Ravioli with Hazlenut-Brown Butter Sauce p.236


The recipe

This dish was my contender in our ongoing series of food battles. They faced off against my dining companion’s lovely beet and ricotta stuffed ravioli, which turned a vibrant fuchsia as they cooked. As is always the case with these battles, we both think we’ve won, because we’ve chosen recipes that suit our moods that night. The only way to solve this is to get an outside expert to come eat with us. My sister loves the idea of judging my food, but she doesn’t eat red meat, which limits her judging potential. This battle was completely meat free, and we just forgot to invite her. She brings it up every time I see her, and I don’t think she’ll forgive me ’till I show up on her doorstep with a ravioli sampler platter.

The ravioli came together easily. You start by roasting a butternut squash, scooping it out, and mashing the flesh. You then brown onion in butter with sage salt and pepper, and mix it into the squash, along with some of the oldest, hardest, and stinkiest goat cheese you can get your hands on. The squash is then distributed among 60 wonton wrappers, and sealed up. You can do all of this ahead, and refrigerate the ravioli ’till dinner time. While the water for the ravioli is coming to a boil, you brown butter with chopped toasted hazelnuts. The ravioli are boiled for a few minutes, and served with the hazelnut-brown butter drizzled on top.

I cheated with this recipe. I decided to do about five times more work than The Book called for, and made my own pasta for the ravioli. Wonton wrappers are just fine, and work quite well for ravioli, but I really prefer fresh pasta for applications like this. The texture is just that much more appealing, and in theory you have much more control of the shape (in practice some of those shapes are a little wonky). Making pasta is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, and the rolling is exceedingly satisfying. The ravioli were very good, and I think that’s in part due to the pasta. I imagine they’d be fairly similar with wonton wrappers though.

These ravioli were really hearty. They were absolutely delicious, and intensely flavourful. In fact they were so flavour packed that I’d only want to eat two or three of them. They would work best as one course in an elaborate dinner. Roasted butternut squash is high on my list of good things in this world, and it has a wonderful affinity for sage and goat cheese. The flavour pairings in this dish are absolutely right, everything is well proportioned, and it tastes rich and luxurious without being overwhelming.

I could have lived without the hazlenut-brown butter sauce. It was nice and all, but I didn’t find it all that necessary. Preparing the hazelnuts was a hassle, they had to be toasted, and then rolled in a cloth to get their skins off. Unfortunately the skins didn’t quite come all the way off, and flecks of skin ended up burning in my butter, adding unattractive black specks, and a bit of a charred flavour. The ravioli were certainly rich enough without adding nuts, and it was possibly one flavour too many. A little brown butter would have been a nice accompaniment, but the hazelnuts were overkill.

I was very well pleased with my entry to Battle: Ravioli. I’d absolutely make these again, and I’d probably make a double batch just to stash some in the freezer.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

146. Sweet Potato Parsnip Purée p.584


The recipe

This dish seemed like a winner, but ended up a real disappointment. I’m a fan of sweet potatoes, and I adore parsnips, so what could possibly go wrong? It’s about a simple as a recipe can get, you just simmer chunks of sweet potato and parsnip ’till they’re tender, and run them through the food processor with butter, milk, brown sugar, salt, and pepper.

Looking at the recipe I thought the brown sugar would bring out the essence of the sweet potato and highlight some of its deeper flavours. I didn’t worry about extra sugar because the sharp turnipy bite of the parsnip would be there to pull the dish back from the saccharine edge. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The already sweet enough thank-you-very-much potatoes ended up cloying. The parsnips added a hint of a counterpoint, but not nearly enough, they did lend prominent overtones of bark and wood chips though. The recipe called for light brown sugar, which didn’t have enough molasses to do much for the flavour.

Probably the worst part of the recipe was the texture. The time in the food processor reduced this to a gummy coating paste. Every bite left me with the feeling of peanut butter glued to the roof of my mouth. I made the mistake of leaving some of the dishes for the morning, and the gunk in the food processor set up into a form of organic concrete. Add the weird, almost yellow, kinda orange, but definitely neon colour palate of this dish, and I was ready to be done with it.

I had half my portion on the night we made it, and tried to get through a bit more over the next couple days. Eventually I gave up and let it moulder in the fridge ’till I could throw it out in good conscience. Oddly, the Epicurious reviews for this recipe are fairly positive, so maybe I’m missing something. Mashed sweet potatoes are wonderful things, but from now on I’ll roast my parsnips and serve them along side.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

145. Cider Braised Pork Shoulder with Caramelized Onions p.476


The recipe

I love to braise. It’s almost worth suffering through the interminable and bitter winter of Montreal to do it. Of course you could braise all year round if you really wanted to, but somehow simmering meat for hours in the middle of July just doesn’t sound like a good idea. Braised meats are delicious, so I’ve tried letting someone in the kitchen at a restaurant suffer through the heat, and ordered it. Unfortunately it’s just too heavy to be enjoyable, and the process of doing it myself is one of my favourite parts. You really need a miserably blustery day to truly appreciate the joys of a good braise. I love the side benefits of the whole house smelling wonderful for a day, and the comforting knowledge that dinner is getting itself ready, and the more you ignore it the better it will be. With our oil heating, leaving the stove on is also a pretty economical way to heat the house.

You can’t beat a braise for thrift either. You can keep your precious tenderloins, give me the gnarliest, toughest, and cheapest cut of meat you can find, and it will turn to gold after a few hours with Le Creuset. It’s amazing to see this awful slab of meat transformed. The fat renders, and gets skimmed away, the connective tissue dissolves and become that elixir of mouth-feel, gelatin, and even the toughest cuts yeild to a fork. Those braising bits have so much more flavour than the quick searing cuts of meat, it just takes a little time to coax it out.

This recipe starts with a skin-on picnic ham. You score the skin, and insert cloves of garlic into the meat, add salt and pepper, and then brown it thoroughly in a heavy pot (cast iron is your friend). Once the meat is browned, you remove it, and sauté a whole whack of onions in the pot. When the onions turn golden, you add unfiltered apple cider, and the meat back to the pot. Then you seal it up, stick it in a 325 oven, and walk away for the next three hours or so. When you’re ready to serve, you remove the meat, and reduce the braising liquid to two cups. If the lid of your pot doesn’t have an extremely tight seal this will have happened naturally.

You can serve the pork right away, but it’ll taste better if you let it cool in the braising liquid, refrigerate it overnight, and then serve it for dinner the following day. This also makes defatting the sauce easy. The recipe doesn’t call for it, but I think it’s a necessary step. There’s a huge amount of fat on a pork shoulder, and most of it melts into the sauce. Even if you don’t have time to cool it it’s worth letting the liquid sit, and skimming part of the fat away. That’s one of the recipe’s biggest weaknesses. I defatted my sauce, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much if I’d followed the recipe exactly.

Recipes are never very specific about how much you should brown meat for a braise. Older books spout that nonsense about sealing in flavour, but really you’re building flavour. The darker the meat gets, without burning, the more flavourful your braise will turn out. There’s nothing at all wrong with your browned meat looking more than a little black, just avoid billowing clouds of smoke.

Braised pork shoulders are always good, it’s nearly impossible to mess a recipe like this up. This particular braise was minimalist, with just a few ingredients. I think it could have easily accommodated another flavour, a sprig of thyme would have done wonders. It was also a little unbalanced, both the onions and the cider were very sweet, and a little vinegar would have been welcome. The texture was excellent, succulent and falling apart, with a thick hearty sauce to go along with he meat. It made quite a nice dinner, but it was an outrageously good sandwich the following day.

The recipe’s biggest weakness was the skipping of the defatting step, other than that I have only minor quibbles. If you’re OK with sweeter meat dishes, leave it as is, if not go with some cider vinegar. I’d add herbs depending on my mood, it’s very nice even without them. If you don’t braise a lot, this recipe is certainly worth trying. And, if not this recipe, then some recipe, get out there and eat low on the hog.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

137. Ratatouille p.586


The recipe

Everyone, or at least everyone who cares about food, has a stockpile of formative food memories, often centred on parents and grandparents doing things the way they’d always been done, or traveling experiences where the zeitgeist of your food universe is overturned by a brand new culture. The list of culinary luminaries who trace their food awakenings back to a summer trip to France is longer than I’d care to count. So it should come as no surprise that my thirteen year old self came home from a month long stay with a family near Lyons with a different perspective on food, and in particular ratatouille.

I don’t think I took nearly as much advantage of my time there as I should have, I mostly sulked, pittied myself, and felt homesick. I was an awful house guest, and I was convinced I was being punished. But, my hosts graciously put up with this insufferable Canadian brat, and exposed me to some wonderful things that I wasn’t ready to appreciate. Fifteen years later I can still taste most of the meals we ate, and the idea of staying in a four hundred year old farm house, surrounded by rolling pastures, creaky old barns, and tiny streams sounds wonderful. I wish I could go back and gather snails off the rocks in the field after a rain for escargot in garlic butter, and the weekly farmers market wouldn’t seem like the painful drudgery it did at the time. I owe that family a huge debt of gratitude, and an apology.

I did appreciate most of the food experiences at the time, the rich creamy yogurt was unlike anything I’d ever eaten, the impeccably cured sausages were a revelation, and of course the cheese. I also started to come around on very rare steak. The biggest change was the idea that vegetables could good enough to crave, and not just an afterthought to be gotten out of if at all possible. Ratatouille was the catalyst for that change. A nice older couple who had helped to organize my trip invited us over for lunch in the back garden, where we ate ratatouille, baguette, and nibbled on olives. At first I was puzzled by the lack of a meaty main course, but soon I couldn’t have cared less. The ratatouille was unbelievably good, and I just couldn’t understand why. My mother had made it before, and I was way to smart to fall for her hiding veggies in a stew trickery, so I turned my nose up at it. But this ratatouille was a completely different being, it was insanely flavourful, and multi layered with each element distinct, but contributing to the whole. There were tomatoes, garlic, peppers, onions, zucchini, eggplant, that were more fresh and explosively flavourful than I could ever have conceived of them being. That meal filled me with a sense of profound contentment, connectedness, and peace. Thinking back that euphoria probably had a lot more to do with the Champagne and Beaujolais they let me drink, but one way or another my perspective on ratatouille had been changed. I asked the old man what the secret was, and he told me about herbs de provence, so I brought a big bag home to try to get my mother to recreate it. Of course, my mother had herbs de provence, the secret was really in the incredible produce that went into the stew, and a lifetime spent honing the technique ’till his ratatouille was as good as it could be.

The Book’s ratatouille doesn’t live up to the old man’s, but it at least recalls it. The Book uses a very odd method, the recipe starts by making the tomato sauce with peeled (I didn’t bother) seeded and chopped tomatoes, sliced garlic, parsley, and basil leaves. While the sauce simmers, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, and eggplant are individually browned, then added to the tomato sauce and allowed to simmer for an hour. This batch browning of the veggies does a nice job building flavour, but it’s a huge pain, and it takes a whole whack of oil. I liked the added complexity, but there really was much more oil than necessary. I think you could get a similar effect by tossing the veggies with a more reasonable amount of oil and spreading them on cookie sheets and running them under the broiler for a few minutes. I was also surprised by the lack of herbs de provence, usually that herb blend is de rigueur for ratatouille. The basil only strategy turned out to be quite delicious, but I did miss the other flavours. My favorite ratatouilles have quite distinct chunks of vegetables, which retain some of their original texture, while softening into a cohesive blend with the others. Here, everything got a bit too soft, and I wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better to simmer it for less time, but let it sit in the fridge for a day or two before serving it.

I made this ratatouille twice within a few weeks. I was very well pleased with my first attempt, and decided to bring a second batch to a large family affair. The second attempt just didn’t live up to the first one, and I can’t explain why. The first batch went over pretty well with my dining companion, and some friends I served it to, but the second was largely ignored at dinner. That inconsistency is kind of worrying to me, I have no clue what factors I varied in my second attempt, but it just didn’t have that special something. My first try was very good, and could have been excellent with a few tweaks, however the inexplicably mediocre second attempt will keep me from giving this a great rating.