How To: Ratatouille

Ratatouille is a simple, hearty, healthy one-pot wonder that can be comforting and home-style, or arranged into beautiful rosettes as seen in the Disney movie of the same name - just in case you're wondering, we're NOT going to attempt the rosette version today. We're going with the easy option here.

Ingredients

Ratatouille is extremely healthy: just look at all these vegetables it packs! For a large pot, you will need

• 4 large tomatoes 
• 2 bell peppers (I used yellow simply because of the colour, feel free to use red or green)
• 1 aubergine / eggplant
• 1 onion 
• 3 courgettes / zucchinis (I think I could have packed in 4, but I decided to only use 3 in the end)
• Handful finely chopped basil leaves
• Seasoning - salt & pepper
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• About 100ml - 200ml of water, depending on whether you want to end up with a vegetable broth or not. 

Step 1

Step 1: chop everything. This is actually quite time consuming - took me 40 minutes! Then again, I'm not a very experienced cook, someone who is more talented in this area might do a quicker job. It's also rather therapeutic. 

Tip: if you want to just use one chopping board (less cleaning, right?), make sure you cut in roughly this order: aubergine / courgettes / bell peppers first, as they are neither particularly juicy nor smelly; tomatoes second; onion last. You want to minimise your crying time - and I particularly detest the smell of raw onions, so I was pretty keen to minimise my exposure to that as well. 

Step 2: heat the olive oil on medium low heat.

Step 3

Step 3: cook the onions until soft. Isn't it magical how raw onion smells so terrible; yet cooked onions smell like heaven? 

Step 4

Step 4: dump all your other ingredients (except basil and seasoning) in and add your water. 100ml will give you a hearty, thick ratatouille, 200ml water will give you a broth. Remember that all the vegetables will reduce and yield liquid as well. 

Tip: put the tomatoes at the bottom, as being the wettest vegetable it has less chance of burning. 

Step 5

Step 5: let simmer, covered, until the vegetables are soft. This will take around 40-50 minutes. Give it a stir every now and then, just to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pot. Add the chopped basil, cover and let simmer for another 5 minutes.

Step 6: season with salt and pepper. I chose not to season while I cook so that I can use this one batch of ratatouille for multiple purposes. What I love about ratatouille is how versatile it is: have a big bowl of it as is; reduce the liquid down and season more heavily to make it into a toast topping; increase the amount of liquid used during cooking to create a beautiful vegetable broth with which you can cook quinoa, pasta or risotto; or enjoy as a side dish to meat / accompaniment to bread.

In addition, ratatouille keeps well in the fridge, so you can make a batch, save in glass air-tight containers, and voila, you can save it for up to 3 days.