What do you do when the garden is bulging with tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, onions, and garlic, and you just can’t eat them all quickly enough to keep up? Why, you make and freeze a few batches of ratatouille!
That’s what I did last night. Sautéed up everything but the tomatoes in a good slosh of olive oil in the wok. Once the veggies were cooked golden, I dumped in approximately twice the volume of tomatoes as the other vegetables and left it to simmer for 20-30 minutes until everything was well cooked.
Once it cooled, I ladled it into Ziploc bags, labeled them, and froze them flat. Except for the amount I pulled out for supper!
In the winter, when I want to serve ratatouille, I run a bag under hot water until I can break up the chunks, then dump the ratatouille into a baking pan. I top it with a few raw or even frozen sausages and toss it in the oven at 350 for about 45 minutes… long enough for me to walk to the other end of our road and back!
Recipe? What’s that?
It’s slightly different every time I make it, depending on what’s abundant in the garden. This is the list I usually pick from:
• Onion
• Zucchini
• Eggplant
• Red/Yellow Peppers
• Garlic
• Tomatoes
• Salt & Pepper
• Red Pepper Flakes (or substitute tabasco sauce)
If you don’t have all those things, or don’t like some of them, then use what you have/like. As with any stew, this is adaptable. Add salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste. We’ve had it with Mennonite farmer sausage, Italian sausage, chorizo, and brats. This time I used some all-beef sausages from the local butcher.
Question: how easy and delicious is that?
Answer: very!
For Trim Healthy Mama:
THM doesn’t recommend cooking with olive oil, so feel free to use coconut oil, butter, or lard instead of olive oil. This is a THM S meal (fat) as written, and it’s how I almost always have it.
You could make it FP (fuel pull) if you limited the cooking fat (add a bit of broth instead, or add the juicy tomatoes earlier). If creating a low-fat version, you could choose to add a lean meat (such as chicken breast or lean chicken or turkey sausage). Serving it over rice, quinoa, or a sweet potato would turn the FP version into an E (carb) meal. But I usually cook with too much fat and use a higher fat sausage!
This is a recipe Sadie from Raindrops on Radishes might come to enjoy early in her Trim Healthy Mama story!
Please Note: I am not an authorized Trim Healthy Mama coach or blogger, although I play one in fiction…