Don't watch the pot, watch a movie. Oven ratatouille

Ragazzi, Annalena must make a confession right up front:  she is NOT a  big fan of ratatouille.  It always struck her as a dish where "the whole is less than the sum of its parts" if you get what she means.  She loves eggplant, squash, and tomatoes individually, but put them together, and she always feels like  singing Peggy Lee's  "Is that All There Is?"

As she found out this past week, however,  there is far from uniform agreement with her on this.  In fact, there was dissention within the ranks.  See, Annalena was confronting the fact that there was yet more eggplant and yet more squash in the house, and wondering what to do.  She said , to the Guyman  "well, I COULD make another one of those Queen Mary size dishes of ratatouille, but we don't want that."    The Guyman was quiet and made his "Uh... should I keep quiet or speak up" face, which always means  "Ok Annalena, there's something here that you don't know."  So she followed up with  the inevitable question  "you LIKE ratatouille," and the answer was "uh, Yeah." 

Well, what can you do with that?  So, plans were afoot to make it.

Now, for years, Annalena has made stovetop ratatouille, in the biggest pot she has.  It is always a mess. Always something requiring a fair amount of tending,  and just, frankly, a pain in the ....."  So she went looking for other alternatives.

Surprisingly, Mr. Bittman had an option that appealed:  an oven ratatouille.    See, for some cooks,  if a dish involves using the oven, it is immediately discarded.  Annalena, however, probably channeling her Hansel and Gretel witch genes, LOVES using her oven.  So, away she went.    And this is better than stovetop.  It really is.  It's easier, and it tastes a little better.

She remains not a fan, however.  For those of you who like or, as Annalena found out, LOVE this dish, this is for you.  Just make sure you have lots of friends who like it, or that you like it a lot, because there is no way to make a SMALL pot of the stuff.


You will need eggplants, squash, and tomatoes.  Also onions, garlic, thyme, basil, salt and olive oil.  For the first three, try to get equal quantities of each,  and two pounds or so of each is the right amount.  Skin the tomatoes  (cross em at the bottom, put them in hot water for 30 seconds, pull em out, cool em, and peel em.  You can do it while you prep the other veggies.     Cut the eggplants into cubes (use smaller ones, but you can use the plain old purple ones.  Provencalese have used them for hundreds of years).  You do not have to peel them, in fact you should not, but wash them then.  Do the same thing for your squash.  And this is a place to use the monster squash that escaped surveillance in your garden if you have a garden (and if you grow squash, there is inevitably one or, even more, which all of a sudden show up looking like a weapon of mass destruction).  Peel and slice the onions.    When the tomatoes are ready, chop them.  Now peel and half ten - that's right, ten - cloves of garlic.    Get a nice bunch of thyme, and cut away the very wooden part of it, but don't chop it.     And finally, pour yourself out a half cup of good olive oil.

Here we go.  Put a large earthenware baking dish on a baking sheet (key word here, ragazzi, is "LARGE".  You have well over six pounds of vegetables darlings).   And preheat your oven to 350.    Put a few tablespoons of olive oil in the base of the dish, and then add the sliced onions.  Salt them.  Salt liberally.  You will need more salt than you think, because eggplant and squash are essentially insipid without help.    Now, pile the eggplant on top of that.  More salt, please.  Then the squash.  Also, more salt.  Now tomatoes (and guess what?).  Finally,  put the sprigs of thyme and then the garlic on top of this, and again.... you guessed it.  Pour the rest of the olive oil over the mass, and put it into your oven.

You're going to bake this for an hour, and every fifteen minutes, go in and push the vegetables down with a spatula of some sort.    For the first forty five minutes or so, you will have your doubts.  You will have SERIOUS doubts and feel that Annalena has led you astray.  She knows, ragazzi, she knows.  For after 45 minutes, she was saying "THIS ISN"T COOKING."  Then, in the last fifteen minutes, something dramatic happens:  the vegetables all collapsed, a fair amount of liquid formed, and we had ... RATATOUILLE.    Take it out of the oven, stir it around (you'd be astonished, perhaps, at how much collapse there is), and then tear up some fresh basil and stir it into the mass.  Don't worry about the thyme sprigs:  this is a rustic dish and anyone who has difficulty with a thyme sprig in their food, doesn't deserve your cooking.

Let this cool, so that it firms up a bit.  It's better the next day, but you can eat it the same.

Annalena secured three quarts of ratatouille from this recipe.  And for all of you who are gaping at HALF A CUP OF OIL.... ok, 3 quarts is 12 cups.  Half a cup is four ounces.  So, if you figure a cup is a portion, you have 1/3 of an ounce of olive oil per portion.  Know how much that is?  Less than a tablespoon.

Eat up ragazzi.  And if you have clever and fascinating ways to use this stuff, please tell Annalena.  She has two quarts of it left.