Dinner at Tony’s

I was invited to a dinner party at Tony’s, and volunteered to prepare a dish. The theme for the evening was “heavy garlic,” and we talked about what movie to watch… I volunteered to bring my DVD of Ratatouille, and then decided that a garlicky ratatouille would be a good fit for me to bring.

Next, I researched a ratatouille recipe that looks like the one in the movie. The original, as can be seen on some of the DVD extras, is by Thomas Keller. It’s a little involved. I found a simplified version over at Smitten Kitchen’s blog that looked tasty, so my next step was to hit the St. Lawrence Market to buy ingredients. Yes, I know that this is absolutely the wrong time of year to be making ratatouille, that the vegetables all are being flown in from South America. Most of the time I do cook local. Every once in a while, I go exotic.

I wasn’t quite sure of the quantities to get (hadn’t decided what I was going to bake it in!), so I did end up with one yellow squash and one zucchini unused, and I have a bunch of slices of everything in a ziplock bag in my fridge that are going to become more ratatouille today.

Wash, chop the ends, and then run all the veggie tubes through the mandoline. Put each vegetable in a separate bowl, and then make short stacks and arrange them on top of the tomato purée.

Put it in the oven — this was in for about an hour, mostly at 350F.

Delicious dinner with friends. Tony made a Thai peanut chicken and salad (and guacamole, which we had earlier) and Bill and Claire brought a fruit salad and fruit pie.

This entry was posted on 22 January 2012 at 11:52 and is filed under Food - farmers' market, Food, recipes, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.