A little French cooking

We watched the movie Ratatouille yesterday. We, being myself and Miss E. Mister e sort of watched... mostly in 1 minute sections. I'm not sure how much he retained. Any hoo, Miss E was very curious about the actual dish of ratatouille. So we found a recipe and walked to the store and loaded up on fresh vegetables. Ratatouille is a French country vegetable stew, but instead of doing it in the traditional chopped vegetable style, we decided to make it exactly like Remy does in the movie.

So Miss E taped this to the front door....

... and we were in business.

Thank goodness for the food processor. We didn't have to slice all these veggies on a mandoline.. or worse- by hand!



Miss E was very excited about the whole process. We made a separate tomato sauce which she stirred on the stove.



We put the sauce in the bottom of the dishes and then layered all the vegetables on top: summer squash, eggplant, onions, red and yellow pepper, and parsnips...



They really turned out pretty with all the overlapping layers of color...



And then into the oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes and the finished product...



We used a baked version as the base recipe from Chocolate and Zuchini's cookbook. The cookbook is wonderful, and I've been wanting to try something out of there.
Of course, after all the shopping, prepping, cooking and excitement, Miss E decided that she didn't want to actually eat the ratatouille for dinner. Too bad, it is very good. And like several recipes state, it IS better the next day... after the flavors meld.