A summer recipe in the winter in hopes that warmer weather is just around the corner! Full of earthy eggplant, mellow zucchini and juicy peppers, this ratatouille is rich and flavourful. Feel free to play around with the spices to find your favourite flavour combination. As is surprisingly common here on Sophreakin’ Good, this is more of a method than an exact recipe!
Quick facts: Although this recipe calls for zucchini, you could easily use other types of summer squash like vegetable marrow. A quick heads up: this recipe uses nightshades (peppers, tomatoes, eggplant), which are thought to aggravate certain autoimmune conditions – read all about nightshades here.
Ingredients
- 1 large onion
- 1 large eggplant
- 1 large zucchini
- 1 large sweet pepper
- large handful of cherry or grape tomatoes
- 1 tsp marjoram
- 1 tsp thyme
- 1 tsp dried parsley
- 1 tsp dried basil
- several pinches of salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- 3-4 cloves of garlic
- extra virgin olive oil
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350° F.
- Wash and slice onion, eggplant, zucchini and sweet pepper into a large bowl. However you choose to cut your vegetables (cubed, sliced, etc), ensure the pieces are roughly the same size.
- Halve the cherry tomatoes and add them to the vegetables.
- Add all of the spices to the vegetables, adding salt and pepper to taste.
- Using a garlic press or microplane, add garlic into the bowl, and finish with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil.
- Toss to coat everything well and dump mixture into a baking dish. You can line your baking dish with parchment paper if you’d like.
- Bake for 1-1.5 hours, giving everything a good mix every 20-30 minutes.
