Like Ratatouille, but Italian: Peperonata

The difference? You add a few potatoes and zucchini and the balance leans toward peppers. The rest is about the same. A rustic dish of eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, zucchini, and garlic. With a whole bunch of olive oil and minimal spices. Simple and delicious. Great with crusty loaf and dry red wine to make you feel kind of European. My Eastern European heritage is screaming, “Where’s the butter??!!” but I’m yelling back, “If you want butter go milk the cow your own d*** self.” Usually that ends the argument.

I ended up with a bunch of all these ingredients accumulating in my fridge after a few weeks of Lufa Farms Fresh Baskets and this seemed like the perfect way to use them up deliciously. There are only so many raw tomatoes a woman can eat. I can’t believe I actually got all the way through the potatoes! Now I wish I had more potatoes, which is completely ridiculous after a summer of trying to figure out how to use them up (so much gnocchi and potato salad).

Peperonata

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• A few garlic cloves, crushed (sliced in half or diced are fine – depends if you like big chunks of garlic or not)
• 2 lb bell peppers (throw in a hot one if you want) of any colour, seeded, cored, and sliced in large pieces lengthwise
• 1 or 2 petit hot peppers (red or green, though red is less bitter) sliced in half, seeds removed
• 2 onions, cut in quarters
• 3 big potatoes, peeled and cut in big pieces lengthwise
• 4 medium sized tomatoes, peeled and diced (or just diced if you don’t want to plunk them in a big pot of boiling water for a minute and then into a bowl of ice cold water to make their skins come off easily)
• 2 zucchini cut in big pieces lengthwise
• 2 small eggplant cut in big pieces lengthwise
• Salt and pepper
• optional herbs (chopped parsley, thyme, or basil for something strong)

Directions

You basically just want all your big pieces of vegetables to be about the same size. The small they are the more quickly they’ll cook, but bigger pieces leaves them more toothsome generally (as opposed to baby food diced vegetables for dinner).

Heat a large pot over medium heat and add the olive oil (you don’t really want to heat the olive oil in the pot as that can hurt the oil). Add the garlic cloves and brown them gently. Add the peppers (mild bells and the hot ones), onions, and potatoes. Season generously with salt and pepper (they dish doesn’t have a lot of added flavour, so be extremely generous and taste regularly once the vegetables start to soften) and reduce heat to medium-low. Cook for about 5 minutes. Add a little water if you need to keep the vegetables from sticking, but a whole 1/4 cup of oil should make that next to impossible.

Reduce the temperature to low, cover, and cook about 15 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant. Season with salt and pepper again.

Cover and cook until all the vegetables are cooked and soft enough to bite (I’m looking at you, eggplant). Check the seasoning, adding more salt and pepper and some parsley or thyme if you want. Take out (or leave in…) the hot pepper halves. Serve at room temperature on bread, with pasta, as a side dish or as a salad. I also had Lufa Farms lettuce, so the salad and bread option won. Fortunately this makes a ton of food and the leftover can get used up as wraps, sandwiches, and any other way your heart desires.