Wow, I did not mean to go more than two whole months without posting any new recipes! But school's finally out for summer, and I have a few things up my sleeve to share.
It's still a little early in my neck of the woods for most of our local produce to make an appearance, but one vegetable that has a recurring role at my dinner table is zucchini. There are many, many ways to prepare this veggie, but my favorite (and one of the few ways my husband will willingly eat it), is a sort of Italian-style stew with onions and tomatoes. My mom used to make this all the time when I was a kid, and for some reason we referred to it as "fixed" zucchini. Not necessarily because other ways of cooking zucchini were "broken", of course, but I think because it was "fixed up" with herbs and such.
This family recipe is very easy and can be adjusted for any number of servings. If you serve it with some nice crusty bread, it can stand in as a light main course, perhaps for lunch. It also pairs well with grilled chicken as a side dish. I still recommend crusty bread to sop up all the juices.
Since I'm finally getting back the energy and drive to cook again, it felt good to be in the kitchen, putzing with one of my favorite recipes. This was something I experimented with a couple summers ago when we had a boom year for tomatoes, and it was so tasty, this spicy Sicilian style sauce has become something of a standard in our house.
I'm not 100% sure if it's accurate to call this "Sicilian style", but based on what I saw and ate when I was actually in Sicily a few years ago, I think it's close enough.
A few months ago, I was combing the internet for ratatouille recipes, and came across Smitten Kitchen's version of the baked ratatouille featured in Disney's Ratatouille. You know the one: the spirals of colorful eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash and red peppers that cause the cynical food critic to recall the carefree days of his childhood, when a dish of warm ratatouille, made by his mother, had the power to sooth all ills.
Thanks to the acquisition of an OXO Good Grips Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer (for free from OXO, I might add) and the opportunity to test said mandoline slicer as part of OXO's Healthy Eating product promotion, I had the perfect tool to make the thin slices required for this baked ratatouille dish.
I was pretty excited to get my OXO hand-held mandoline slicer in the mail. I love my chef's knives and am very proud over my steadily improving skill with chopping and slicing. But I'm not very good at uniformity, and had been sort of wanting a mandoline slicer for a while now. I hope my readers are excited about this product, too, because OXO actually sent me TWO slicers - one for me to test and keep, and one to giveaway to a reader in the United States (more on the giveaway in a moment).
There are a lot of great things about the OXO hand-held slicer. It has an ergonomic handle to reduce strain and fatigue in your wrist. There's a non-slip edge on the top of the slicer, so it won't go sliding around your cutting surface - plus there's a little "notch" in this edge so you can set it over a bowl and slice directly into salads, sauces, or what ever else you might be making. It has a food holder to protect your fingers. There are three settings for the cutting edge, and you can lock the slicer so the sharp blade isn't hanging out for all and sundry to accidentally cut themselves on.
Perhaps my favorite part is the fact that it's dishwasher safe. After my foray into ratatouille, and later sweet potato fries, there was a little bit of staining on the white plastic, but it came off pretty easily with just a touch of "elbow grease."
While the pros of this product are vast (easier to store than a traditional mandoline slicer, the non-slip features, the bent handle to reduce wrist fatigue), it's not a perfect product. Though, to be perfectly honest, I only had one major complaint. The food holder has plastic pegs that don't really stick very well in the food you're trying to slice, so unless you're using somewhat small pieces of vegetables or fruit, you're going to have trouble keeping the holder on the food. It would have been a better design to have stainless steel pegs that would actually puncture the flesh of the vegetables I was trying to slice. I had to hold the vegetables in my hand until they were small enough to use the food holder.
Check out this little YouTube video of mine (I apologize for the somewhat bad sound and video, my microphone and camera aren't the best quality) for a demonstration.
I'll get to the recipe for my ratatouille after the jump break, but first, let me tell you about the giveaway!
One lucky reader in the United States (sorry, international fans!) will become the owner of the second OXO Good Grips Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer in my possession! All you have to do is leave a comment on this post, telling me what you like about the mandoline slicer and what you would use it for if you won.
The winner will be chosen via a random integer generator. The giveaway will end at midnight, Eastern standard time, on Monday, May 21st. Only residents of the continental United States are eligible for this particular giveaway.
Now, keep reading for the scoop on that ratatouille!
I tried out another recipe from my Turbo Fire recipe book a while back, and sort of forgot about it. But since we're about halfway through Lent, and it happens to be a meatless dish, I thought I'd share it in case anyone needs a tasty meat-free meal idea for this coming Friday.
Now, the way I prepared this meal is a bit differently from the original recipe, mostly because of what I had on hand in my refrigerator. So I'll give you the run down of what I did when I made it.
