Ratatouille

This is just fine as ratatouilles go -- slightly easier and quicker than the version at Smitten Kitchen but with not quite the depth of flavor of Deb's version. Colicchio has you cook the ingredients (onion, zucchini, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes) separately and serially, adding additional garlic and fresh basil at each step, plus salt and pepper. Then you toss them all back in the same pan and cook for another fifteen minutes. After that, you drain the cooked veggies in a colander saving the juices in a bowl, return the juices to the pan and reduce them until slightly thickened, and then return all the veggies to pan again. I expected those thickened juices to really enhance the flavor ... but I ended up with basically no juices when I drained the veggies.

I served this with red snapper fillets -- crisping the skin per the recipe for braised red snapper on p. 61. But then instead of braising the snapper in the lemon vinaigrette called for in that recipe, I set the fillets on top of the ratatouille, covered the pan and braised the fish for about five minutes.