Eggplant, Tomato and Zucchini Gratin with Parsley Breadcrumbs

I have tried writing about coming home for the last four weeks, unsuccessful as you can see. But we are back, and I am cooking again. It is good to be back after such a long hiatus. I might write about the rest of our trip on a later date and maybe about coming home, but right now I don't find the words and prefer to enjoy the moment instead of looking back.

I was so happy not to have missed all of summer's vegetable bounty. When we returned, tomatoes were just getting really juicy and sweet and lovely sprinkled with a little salt and the olive oil we brought back from Italy back in spring. And since we've been back in our apartment, we've had a bowl full of San Marzano tomatoes on our kitchen table. Ready to be eaten. Ready to be cooked down into a simple, garlicky tomato sauce. We made a lasagne with fresh tomatoes (which actually turned out dry, sorry mum) and today I made this gratin I found in Vegetable Literacy, a cookbook I bought just before leaving for Bolivia and haven't actually used it much since then (for obvious reasons).

Like Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty, Vegetable Literacy is divided into chapters according to vegetable family, which is very helpful when you find yourself with an abundace of summer squash, green beans or run out of inspiration in the middle of winter on how to use carrots or cabbage. And considering the fact that the gratin I made today turned out wonderfully, I think I am going to cook from this cookbook quite a few times in the future.

The recipe for the gratin can be divided into two parts, first you make a rataouille of sorts, cooking the eggplant and tomatoes into a thick stew while lightly steaming the zucchini slices that Deborah Madison makes you place on top of the sauce, keeping them from falling apart.
Then you scatter breadcrumbs over the ratatouille and after 25 minutes in the oven soft pieces of eggplant and tomato and zucchini with a herby crunchy topping emerge.

Eggplant, Tomato and Zucchini Gratin with Parsley Breadcrumbs
Adapted from a recipe in Vegetable Literacy, by Deborah Madison
Note: Deborah Madison has you top the ratatouille with slices of mozzarella, which in my opinion, does not much for the dish itsself, so next time I would omit the mozzarella and maybe stir in some parmesan with the breadcrumbs or keep this as is.

for the ratatouille
1 eggplant, quartered lengthwise and cut into slices
2 onions, cut into thin wedges
3 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dried marjoram
1 tsp dried rosemary
4 San Marzano tomatoes (or 5-6 of regular round tomatoes), cut into dice sized pieces
2 smallish zucchinis, cut into slices the same width as the eggplant
salt and pepper
2 tbsp tomato paste

for the topping
1 clove of garlic
a bunch of parsley
1 cup breadcrumbs
salt
3 tbsp olive oil

Before preparing the other vegetables, slice the eggplant and lightly salt the slices. After prepping everything else, dab the excess moisture off of the slices.
Preheat the oven to 375°F/200°C.
In a skillet with a lid, heat the olive oil on medium heat. Sauté the onion until translucent and fragrant, then add the dried herbs and garlic and let cook for another minute or so. Then stir in the eggplant and tomatoes and sauté a minute or two before turning down the heat. Place the zucchini slices on top of the eggplant and tomato stew, cover the skillet and let cook, on low heat, for 20 minutes or so.
While the ratatouille cooks, prepare the topping. Putthe garlic and parsley into the bowl of a small food processor and give it a whiz until cut into smallish pieces, then add the breadcrumbs and pulse until the breadcrumbs are mostly green. Stir in the olive oil and set aside.
With two spoons remove the stew from the skillet into a baking dish and mix in the tomato paste with the liquid that remains in the skillet. Add this liquid to the ratatouille. Top everything off with the green breadcrumbs and bake for 25 minutes.

Serves 4.

Yellow Bean Salad with Fennel and Celery

I love to go to the farmers market on Saturday morning. I say that now that I went today, but I don't want you to live with the impression that I go to the farmers market every Saturday.
I would love to be that person, always buying her produce at the same market stand, with the farmer knowing my name and all. But the farmers market conflicts with my sleeping in, and so I don't go too often. I haven't been in quite a while, and when they had plenty of cherries the last time I went, there were none to be seen today. There were grapes instead, but I missed the cherries. I did not buy enough of them while they were here.

So I love to go to the farmers market, and when I do I buy whatever looks best at the market. Today I bought yellow beans (they were called butterbeans) and a few small bulbs of fennel. And bags full of fruit, and tomatos, but these were not featured in this salad.

Lunch on these Saturdays then simply consists of a salad. A simple salad of lots of fresh vegetables, raw or only slightly cooked. I love those saturdays.
I bought these butterbeans at the market because they looked so lovely and creamy, and because of the name. Something called butterbeans sure has to taste great, right? I bought the fennel to accompany the beans in a salad, and only saw back home that Deb from smitten kitchen has shared a quite similar salad before.

Green Gazpacho

I have been absent for quite a while, and I missed you. I missed being here, talking about food. And I missed cooking, too.
You might remember me talking about going to France for a while. And even now, what feels like a year after, I still owe you photos and tales from the land of fabulous food. I'd love to share, and plan to get back to it.

I have been away some more, though, keeping myself away from the computer for another week. I spent one week cooking for 22 kids at a camp, together with my boyfriend. It has been a exhausting but rewarding week.
And the days in between, those I did not spend working, were spent at my boyfriend's family's chalet, where the days are long and lazy, and the computers turned off, for the most part.

I am happy to be back, for now. And I'd love to share this recipe for a green gazpacho with you. I saw this recipe in Ottolenghi's cookbook Plenty just yesterday, and loved the concept of a green gazpacho. And I really liked how these different ingredients worked together to create a soup that tastes like gazpacho, but is still different. I wasn't too sure about the celery in the beginning, but it really blended in nicely. I changed quite a few things, though, some out of laziness, because a gazpacho recipe really should be easy to throw together. Most notably, I refuse to add more than one clove of garlic to a gazpacho, contrary to what you might believe me to do, considering the name of this blog. But adding four cloves of garlic, uncooked, and puree them into this delicate soup, it just destroys the flavor. If you do like your gazpacho to be garlicky, though, add more garlic to your liking. One more thing, last February in Spain, we were served gazpacho as a drink, to accompany the meal we ate. I love this concept, and if you want to try it, you should be adding more water than I suggest in this recipe, to make the gazpacho drinkable.

Zucchini Risotto

 

Every spring I wish I had the opportunity to tend to a garden. I look at seed catalogues, online and offline, together with my mother. I might even order something even though I do.not.have.space. Craaazy, I tell you. Then I visit my parents, frequently, just to get my hands dirty. I talk to the tomato seedlings, to get them to grow nice and quickly. I try to sneek in one or two plants I personally would like to grow, this year's butternut squash is performing nicely, there are already dozens of little squashs visible and growing. 

One advantage of not having a garden myself is a) I don't have to be home and water almost daily, and b) I am not flooded by zucchini. 

I do love zucchini, though, and I have been preparing quite a few things using a zucchini or two. This risotto is a double zucchini risotto (double chocolate sounds better, but we'll leave it at zucchini this time). One zucchini is grated into the risotto, to make for a bit a lighter risotto. The other zucchini is diced, panfried and scattered over the creamy risotto.

Warm Farro Salad with Eggplant, Zucchini and Tofu

I have the interesting habit of carrying cookbooks with me and reading them like "real" books. And I dont me memoir style cookbooks with one or two recipes thrown in between lots of writing. I love to read recipes, and their discriptions. To look at the pictures, too, but I found myself doing this even with books that have little photographs inside.

Today I had Isa Chandra Moskowitz' Appetite for Reduction with me, and on my one hour commute to work and back I read the whole book from front to back. Reading cookbooks always leaves me hungry, and inspired, too.
While today's recipe was inspired by Appetite for Reduction, there is no particular recipe that I adapted from it. Rather I was inspired to use less oil in my cooking than I usually do, and I was surprised that it actually really worked well.
Cooking eggplant usually involves lots of oil, it can soak it all up with no problem. And preparing tofu usually involved more oil than I wanted to admit, too. Not anymore, I was really happy how this all turned out and how the resulting salad was that much lighter and fresher than it would have been otherwise.

The leftovers are going to come to work with me tomorrow, just take it out of the fridge at least an hour before you plan on eating it, grain salads are much better at room temperature than cold, IMHO.

Vegetarian Paella

Lately I felt that I don't share enough of me here on my blog. I am rather shy and a people pleaser in real life, and I guess that is the way I wrote here, too. I am always reluctant to be open and to share my feelings and let people into my life because it makes me vulnerable.
This is life, I know it. Being vulnerable is a good thing. Only when we are open to hurt can we really feel joy, experience deep connections with the important people in our life, and express ourselves freely.
Today I want to share 10 things about me that you (probably) did not know about me.

1. I have said it above: I am a people pleaser, and I don't really like that about myself. Writing it out makes me cringe, I don't want this to be my truth. But I am, and I guess to some degree I'll always be, but I want to not care so much about what other people think of me.

2. I started this blog almost 1 1/2 years ago, but for the first year I only told my boyfriend about it. I told my parents this winter/spring, and shared it on facebook. But the girl I lived with, and shared a kitchen with, never got to know about it. I just did not tell her. I guess that relates to Nr. 1 above.

3. In my free time I enjoy learning about neuropsychology. This stuff is so fascinating, I get books from our university library and read them in the train, I listen to Berkeley podcasts while I work. I read a lot when I was a kid, but at the moment I prefer reading science books to novels.

4.  I lived abroad, in Barcelona, for 5 months when I was 16 years old. Then after school I lived in Galway, Ireland for 3 months, improving my English and just generally having fun. But never in my life have I left Europe. I love to travel, but somehow I always end up in Europe. This summer we are going to Turkey, which is technically between Europe and Asia, so this is going to change soon.

5. Sometimes I am too lazy to shave my legs. I just am. Until I want to go swimming or wear a dress.

6. During school, we were supposed to run lapses every year. I actually don't know how many because I managed to skip every single year. I was the master of skipping sport exams.

7. During all my teenage years I only wore long shorts. And not bikini or bathing suit. I just did not go swimming. I was hot all summer long. But I did not care as long as I could cover up my body.

8. I cut my hair myself. I have curly hair, and I always had troubles getting the cut I wanted. Why do hairdressers always think they need to give me 6oies hair?

9. When I listen to music I mostly just listen to one song on repeat, or the whole album on repeat. It drives my boyfriend half-crazy I think. But I usually just want to listen to something in particular, and if it suits my mood, over and over again.

10.  When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy. Girls were so complicated, with all that discussion about who can be who's friend - I never understood it. I was always a boyish girl, and still today I am not really a girly woman.

And now I want to share a recipe for paella with you. I mentioned above that I lived in Barcelona, Spain for half a year. But while I lived there I did not once have paella. My guest mother did not know how to cook, the only thing she did was fry up some meat and open a bag of pre-washed salad. We cooked paella at school with our Spanish teacher, though, and later when I returned to Spain I did go out to eat paella.