French food focus-About living and cooking in rural France,recipes,lifestyle,comments

FRENCH FOOD FOCUS Latest Post Other Posts Recent Older Truffles Cassoulet Index of Recipes L inks House Sitters FiFi About me About 'My' France Comments to: yankinparisot@gmail.com Archives		Life in rural France - Food - Friends - Wine - Cheese - Comments Welcome to French Food Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food and because I live in rural France the stress will be upon French food. There are numerous posts concerning life in France and, certainly, opinions about anything that strikes my fancy. If you have some good recipes or if you want to rave about any great French restaurants this is the place to do it. I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France! Click Here to send me a comment
		This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right.
	Roast Ratatouille A great & simple vegetable dish. Easy to prepare in advance & goes with most main courses. Pretty yo look at as well. Ingredients: 2 nice big eggplants (aborigine) about a pound (500g) of cherry tomatoes. (if not available just chop regular tomatoes into bite size pieces.) 2 good sized yellow onions 2 each of both red & green sweet peppers 2-3 good sized zucchini (courgettes) Fresh basil (dry if you can't easily find fresh) Salt & Pepper. A dab of olive oil Method: Cut the eggplant into about 1/2 inch cubes then lightly salt it & let it sit in a colander while you prepare all of the other ingredients. Cut up the onion, peppers and zucchini into bite sized pieces. Rinse the salt off of the eggplant then pat dry. Place ALL of the ingredients into a large mixing bowl, add Salt & Pepper & the dab of olive oil. Mix gently, but well. When ready to cook (this can be an hour or many later or the next day) heat an oven to about 190 degrees C. Spread the Ratatouille mixture evenly over a baking tray (or two) & place in the hot oven. Bake for roughly 45 minutes. Until. that is, all the veggies are nicely cooked. As you can see the prep work for this dish consists of cutting things up. The cutting up doesn't even have to be particularly even. Thus the task can be sub contracted to guests or even to older children. The results are great. The Ratatouille looks good and tastes even better. It goes well with most meats, but is particularly good with lamb, posk or chicken.