The Summer Casserole

This has got to stop! The produce coming from my CSA and from the weekly trips to the local farmers’ market where eggplant and bouquets of basil are stacked in bountiful piles that I just can’t leave there have me inundated with vegetables.

This week, I made a dish that I make at least a couple of times every summer when I have these feelings of being buried in zucchini. It’s not really a recipe, per se, and the beauty of it is that you can use whatever you hand. There are no set amounts of anything to put in this dish, so if you don’t like eggplant or you you’ve got fresh thyme, but no basil, this will still turn out to be delicious.

Here’s what you do:

Pull out all the vegetables that you need to use. This can be tomatoes, eggplant, yellow squash, zucchini, bell peppers, onions, garlic, and any kind of herb. Cut the vegetables up into slices or chunks, mince the garlic and a handful of whatever herbs you have, and put them in a big bowl. Drizzle the whole thing with olive oil (not much, 2 tablespoons will do for a huge, huge, batch), sprinkle with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper and toss everything together. Put the vegetables in a baking dish, cover, and bake at 350F until the vegetables are tender, about 1 hour. You don’t need to add water or liquid to the dish, the vegetables will give off their own juices. This is not one of those crisp-tender preparations, so don’t expect crunchy vegetables. They all sort of meld together and some of the eggplant and tomatoes will fall apart, but it’s a very good thing.

What to do with it now? Serve the vegetables over pasta (as in the photo above), polenta, or grits; coarsely chop the vegetables and put them in an omelette or a frittata; or just serve them as a side dish, sprinkled with a little Parmesan cheese along with whatever you’re grilling this week. It’s a healthy, easy, delicious, low-carb way to use up whatever you’ve hauled out of your garden or home from your local market.