Family Night Eats
Dispatches from a plant based kitchen
Hello and welcome to the Valiant’s kitchen newsletter. Our kitchen may be a hot mess, but the food is awesome!
For Family Night Eats this week we will be sharing our families go-to Ratatouille recipe!
My kids are not what you would call ‘picky eaters’. Most of them HAVE BEEN at one point or another when they were younger, but fortunately some combination of parenting, wheedling and good luck have brought us to a place where we don’t have to cater to everyone’s individual food desires at every meal. Which is not to say that they don’t have preferences, or that I don’t get complaints occasionally (they are teenagers!) — but in general, we can typically enjoy our family meals together and have conversations that don’t revolve around convincing somebody to “eat the food because it’s good for them”.
Which was not always the case. When they were younger, we had to occasionally gamify eating in order to get the job done. I can absolutely imagine, one day in the future, my children sitting around their family table looking seriously into the eyes of our petulant grandchildren and saying “As my father always used to say: You don’t have to eat it all, you just have to try it."
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That was our big trick I think. We never forced kids to sit down and finish plates (we tried anticipate and give much smaller portions) but we did have one strict rule: everyone had to put in a serious effort to try everything (no bird nibbles!)
Even me - let’s just say I’m not a fan of broccoli and leave it at that…
One thing we never had to fight over though, was any dish that included tomato sauce. It must be the Italian blood (Tina is half Italian, half Dutch). As long as we could make something that tasted like tomato sauce, our kids would gobble it up. As a result, we’ve become something of an expert with tomato based dishes over the years and one of our favourite’s is Ratatouille. The dish, not the movie - although the movie is great too!!
When I was younger I thought Ratatouille was a super fancy French dish - one that looked like it took a lot of work for the payoff. But here’s a little secret. Ratatouille is a super easy and incredibly delicious meal that only LOOKS fancy.
From the Provençal region in the southeast of France, this dish, like the region, is one of abundance and sunbaked produce combined with garden herbs. If you really want to un-fancy it, the name is derived from the verb touille, which means ‘to stir’. Basically this dish started out as a course stew made from local produce. A simple delicious meal packed with flavour!
Recipes and cooking times vary widely so you will find a lot of variations online - I’ve made a lot of those over the years, and they are all good. Purists would argue that you should cook each vegetable in the recipe individually, then combine and slow cook them all together to get a creamy stew. Delicious! But really, who has the time for all that? Alternatively you could rough chop the veg and throw them in a pot on the stovetop for a very simple version of Ratatouille that captures at least 85% of the dishes charm (and most of the flavour!) — and there are dozens of variations in between. The take away here is that it’s really hard to mess up a Ratatouille! As long as you follow the basics, you can throw anything you have in the fridge into this one and use up any leftovers you may have sitting around!
Ratatouille
This is our take on a creamy, buttery, ratatouille. Our version includes polenta - a staple of the Italian kitchen. It adds a creamy richness and extra volume without making it heavy.
Serves: 8+
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Cook Time: 1 hour
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Vegetable Prep
Slice the following items just under 1 cm, or about ¼ inches.
2 eggplant
6 roma tomatoes
2 yellow squash
2 zucchini
1 tube polenta
Sauce
1 onion, rough chopped
2 bell peppers, rough chopped (*alternate colors for presentation!)
2-4 cloves garlic, minced
2+ tbsp preferred oil
Kosher salt & pepper to taste
28 oz can crushed tomato (* or your favourite pasta sauce)
2 tbsp fresh basil (if using straight crushed tomato)
Herb Topper
If you don’t have fresh herbs, use dried!
2 tbsp fresh basil
1 tsp garlic (about 1 clove diced)
2 tbsp fresh parsley
2 tbsp fresh oregano
2 tsp fresh thyme
Kosher salt & pepper to taste (about ½ tsp each!)
¼ cup of olive oil
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
1 Slice eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini & squash and polenta into even slices between ½ cm and 1 cm (thinner is better!)
2 Make the Sauce: Heat oil in oven safe pan (I prefer cast iron!) and sautee onions and bell pepper over medium heat until soft (5-10 minutes). Add garlic in the last couple of minutes! Season with salt and pepper then add crushed tomatoes and stir until incorporated. Remove from heat, stir in basil and smooth surface with your spoon or a spatula.
3 Add the Veggies: arrange the sliced veggies and polenta in an alternating pattern. What we do is grab one of each thing, layer them up in your hand like a sandwich, and then fan them out a little to set into the pan on top of the sauce. Build your veggies from the outside and move in. Pack them in tightly and don’t be afraid to push them around when they are in the pan to make more room!
4 Make the Herb Seasoning: In a small bowl, mix all of the ingredients together. Spoon the seasoning over the layered vegetables.
5 Sprinkle your favourite grated vegan cheese across the top.
6 Bake covered (with a lid or tin foil) for 40 minutes. Remove the cover and bake for 20 more minutes (60 minutes in total)
Serve over your favourite grain (rice, quinoa, millet, etc), noodle (we love spaghetti or udon) or even baked or mashed potato!
Like I said, this is a flexible recipe. So, let’s look at a few substitutions and variations:
More protein - We love to make this with our sausage crumble! Purists would tut-tut this decision because ratatouille should be a vegetable dish traditionally, but we figure that our sausage crumble is made out of plants, so it’s all good - and delicious.
Don’t have fresh herbs? No worries - use dried! It may not provide quite the same flavour, but it will still be excellent.
Have some celery, carrots, turnip or other vegetables in your fridge that you want to get rid of? Throw them in!
Serve topped with chili flakes and a good plant based parm to push this dish over the top!
Turn it into a Mediterranean dish by adding some vegan feta and black olives and serving over pappardelle noodles.
If you have a little extra time, spiralize the zucchini and use those for the noodle base.
Add a can of chickpeas for a smokey crunch that ups the protein and the fiber.
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