One-Pot Recipe: Easy French Ratatouille

•     When your garden is overflowing and your kitchen is packed with produce, there is ratatouille. This thick and silky French stew of eggplant, zucchini, sweet peppers, and ripe summer tomatoes will use up your extra vegetables in one fell swoop, making enough food to feed a crowd, pack for lunch, and still freeze for later.

• Making ratatouille is definitely a project for a weekend afternoon. It's easy, but fairly time-consuming. First, there's getting all the vegetables washed, chopped, and ready. Then you need to cook them in batches, partly so they can brown instead of steam and partly because the vegetables tend not to fit in a single pot until they've started breaking down a little.
• Once this is all accomplished and the vegetables are simmering away on the back burner, there's the waiting. You can certainly eat your ratatouille as soon as all the vegetables are warmed through — that's a perfectly tasty and fresh meal. But the real magic of ratatouille happens after it's been bubbling away for an hour or more. The vegetables melt into each other, turning silky and completely tender, while the thyme and garlic infuse every corner of the pot. Stirring in the basil at the last minute is the coup de resistance.
• This recipe for ratatouille comes from my dad, a genuine Frenchman who learned to make the dish while growing up. It's filling, it's full of vegetables, and it gets even better on the second and third day. I recommend serving it with plenty of crusty bread close at hand.

           

Easy French Ratatouille