Have you had this experience yet? The day after Thanksgiving, you eat the leftover stuffing and say to yourself, “Damn, this is better the next day.”
Same thing here. This dish smells powerfully wonderful coming out of the oven. It will be hard to restrain yourself. Or, you can just double or triple the recipe, have some out of the oven, and enjoy those leftovers. That’s exactly what Suzen and I did.
We saw a picture of this recipe in the book and knew that it would be our first test. That’s our picture above and I think it demonstrates the intrinsic beauty of this dish. This recipe has remarkable flexibility. You can mix and match ingredients, change proportions, add some fire with chili pepper or pepper flakes. There could be sliced onion or diced garlic.
Or you can just sit back, follow the recipe and enjoy Greek authenticity. If you wanted to have a vegetarian meal, then this can be a main course as Rebecca suggests. Suzen and I enjoyed this as a side paired with Rebecca’s Chicken Baked in Yogurt. The combination was fantastic, almost as good as that Greek cruise we have never managed to take. But, we are become a little nudgy. The recipes in The Islands of Greece will please sure your palate while offering inspiration for travel.
Look for that Chicken Baked in Yogurt recipe to appear next week. You can pair up these vegetables with the chicken as we did, or you can be wisely impatient and enjoy this vegetable dish now.
Of course, you may be inclined to try this recipe over and over again as the summer moves along and then slips into fall. That’s a good idea, for the vegetables themselves — tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant — all take on new characteristics as the seasons meander. This dish can never be the same twice, but will never disappoint.
Greek Vegetable Bake
Yield: serves 2 as a main course
Ingredients:
- 5 tablespoons olive oil
- 6 ounces potato, in ½‑inch slices
- 1 onion, sliced into fine semi-circles
- I courgette (zucchini), in ½‑inch slices
- 1 (bell) pepper in ½‑inch strips
- ½ aubergine (eggplant), in ¼‑inch slices
- 2 tomatoes in ¼‑inch slices
- 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley leaves
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- ½ teaspoon tomato puree (paste)
Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 350°.
In a large, wide sauté pan, heat 3 tablespoons of the olive oil over a medium-high heat. Add the potato, onion, courgette, pepper and aubergine and sauté for 5 minutes, stirring often, just enough to get a little color on the vegetables. Remove from the heat.
Using tongs, remove the potato and place in a layer on the bottom of a 4-cup ovenproof dish. Follow with a layer of courgette, picking up some of the onion as you go. Next add the aubergine and then the pepper, along with more onion. Alternatively, just layer up the vegetables as you prefer. Finish with the tomatoes and parsley and season generously with salt and pepper.
Whisk the tomato puree into 5 fluid ounces of water to dissolve, then pour over the dish. Finish by drizzling with the final 2 tablespoons of olive oil.
Place in the oven and cook for 30 minutes, then remove and baste the vegetables with the juices. Reduce the oven temperature to 325°F and cook for a further I hour, checking every 20 minutes or so that the liquid hasn’t got too low, and that the vegetables aren’t browning too fast. Top up with a little more water, or cover with foil, if necessary.
Remove from the oven when the vegetables are just charred on the top and meltingly soft all the way through. Leave to stand for IO-15 minutes before serving, with plenty of good bread to mop up the juices.
Source: The Islands of Greece by Rebecca Seal [Hardie Grant, 2015]
Photo Information: Canon T2i, 18-55mm Macro Lens, f/5, 1/30th second, ISO-3200