I love ratatouille roasted in the oven. It is so easy to just throw all the vegetables together on a baking sheet. Just make sure to place the vegetables are on a single layer in the roasting pan to ensure roasting and prevent steaming. I think its wonderful how you can put so many different vegetables together and make one beautiful dish. All the flavors compliment each other so nicely. I like to make this dish when I want to eat healthy. I served my ratatouille with a wonderful panko crusted chicken strip that I will share latter this week.

I also want to share with you all a fun program I am participating in called Adopt a Blogger. Adopt a blogger is a program hosted by Kristen at Dine and Dish. Kristen is the nicest lady, always there to answer questions about blogging and photography. She never hesitants to help a newbie blogger like myself. In her spirit of helping newbie bloggers, she has put together this program in which a more experienced blogger is paired with a newbie blogger.

In this program, I have been paired with Jackie from Foodie Reflections. She has been blogging for almost 2 years, and has a professional culinary background, how exciting! Here is her story:

“I didn’t grow up cooking, unless you count occasionally making cookies or spaghetti. In fact, I first discovered cooking while studying abroad in Florence, Italy, during college which is where I took my first cooking class. After Italy, I returned to the U.S., finished my degree in journalism and got my first real job at a public relations agency. During that time I also continued to explore my growing interest in cooking and found myself getting more and more into it.

A few years later I was at a fork in the road and made the decision to leave PR and marketing and go to culinary school full-time. I enrolled at Kendall College in Chicago (where I’m from and had been living since college) and went through a year-and-a-half intensive, military-esque program in culinary arts. It was truly one of my most demanding accomplishments and I am still boggled by how much information I learned and retained in such a short period of time.

I’d always known my goal wasn’t to be a restaurant chef, but I did want to experience that life and did a short stint during culinary school at a local restaurant, which leads to a whole lot of other stories for another time.

After culinary school, I spent about two years working on various food-related projects, including as a personal chef, freelance food writer, recipe tester and food stylist, and six months of that was full-time on a cookbook about Asian noodles. It was during that time I started my blog as a way to practice my writing and quickly became obsessed with it and all things social media.

Most recently, I returned to my PR roots and am currently working at an agency on various food accounts. I still teach classes once a week for Common Threads, a nonprofit that teaches Chicago public school children cooking skills, nutrition and cultural diversity (it’s an amazing program and one I’m very passionate about).”

Roasted Ratatouille Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 large eggplant, diced
• 2 yellow squash, diced
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1 yellow pepper, diced
• 1 green pepper, diced
• 2  zucchini squash, diced
• 1/2 red onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2-3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon dried Italian herbs (oregano, basil, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, savory, and sage)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine vegetables, olive oil, salt, and herbs in a large bowl. Mix well.
2. Place vegetables in a single layer on a large sheet pan. Roast vegetables until browned, about 20-30 minutes at 400 degrees.

Tags: bell pepper, eggplant, squash, zucchini

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 10:03 am and is filed under Side Dishes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.