The classic French Ratatouille - (goes great with many dishes)

Hi everyone, welcome back. Today I am dedicating this recipe to all the vegetarians out there. We've been cooking meat for enough time and now we can start doing a simple dish just made out of vegetables. That's right, but most important today it's Sunday, it's a lazy day and I cannot be asked to make something complicated. And if you're at home, you've got a family and you don't have much time, this is the perfect side dish. The French ratatouille, a simple vegetable stew made of courgette, aubergine, onions, bell pepper, garlic, tomatoes, all cooked together in a pan, slow cooked for 15 minutes and it's ready. It's the perfect combination that you can use with white meats, mainly maybe chicken, veal, pork and also anything like fish, even salmon. So it's a great little side dish to know, easy to make. So let's see how to make the French ratatouille. Right, so for the pantry, very simple. This is all you need for a ratatouille. Tomatoes, bell peppers, take different colors. I took a yellow and a red to vary the color. One onion, I'm not even going to use everything, aubergine, courgette, olive oil, one clove of garlic and for the aromatic herbs, some bay leaves. I'm using one of this satchel of bouquet garni you can find in any supermarket and I've got a little bit of thyme from the garden to add some extra flavor. That's it, stockpot and we're all done. Okay, for the vegetables cutting, nothing special. The only thing you need to see is what I call the one-on, one-off kind of technique. Take your aubergine and before we cut it, we're going to just peel one bit, one stripe, you turn and you do one-on, one-off meaning you get that kind of shape in your courgette. Sorry, I may have said aubergine and you see what you get here? That's what I call the one-on, one-off and it helps the cooking of the actual vegetable. Now, you can do the same with an aubergine. Take a peeler and you just try to, it's a bit more difficult but basically, you try to go, you leave a stripe and you're going to kind of dig in. It's a bit hard, it's a bit tough and you go through and you do that kind of a rough cut of one-on, one-off and we're going to then slice it like that. Alright, so as you can see here, I've already cut in little kind of cubes or your parcel one centimeter of thickness and everything has to be in kind of squares. So, try to do something not too small because that's going to cook for a long time. So, you can see the courgette here. Basically, again, what I'm going to do is just try to slice and try to measure with your finger on having this kind of one centimeter blocks when you cut your courgette, okay? So, this is what you get. You see that kind of trying to show you there. It's a bit of decoration and it looks fun in your pan. And now, for the cooking, very simple, you start with high heat, you put all of your olive oil in there, very simple. Immediately, you're going to start by putting your onions, your garlic and your peppers. It's really, really easy, okay? Now, I'm starting with those because first of all, they give you some color and they are the one that are really tough to cook. So, before the courgette, I infuse my oil with those. So, just a few minutes to give a bit of taste to your oil. Now, when you start to smell this nice kind of the bell peppers, you know, it starts to smell nice. It's time to put the rest of your veggies, mainly your courgette and your aubergine. You then give it a stir. So, be gentle. You try to put everything in. So, you mix the colors basically. Think colors, you know, it has to be nice, it has to look nice. So, you get a nice combination of everything. See, some green, some red, some yellow, looks nice. Okay, when you're here, you can add tomatoes. Over here, start to put your bay leaves, maybe a little bit of thyme, you know, make it nice. Boom. And like I have my bouquet garni that I'm going to place under, right? And you finish with grind of black pepper. Perfect. Look how lovely that is. A bit of salt. And eventually, if you want, you can add some full peppercorns. And you're done. When this is like this, you put your heat on low. You're going to take a lid and you're going to keep this cover on for 15 minutes at low heat. 15 minutes have passed. I've hardly touched my ratatouille. And let's have a look. I've just turned my heat off and this is what we get. The first thing you're going to do here is to discard thyme leaves. And if you can find it, your bouquet garni. And as everything we do in French cooking, we're going to finish this off. If you want, you can keep it like this, but mainly ratatouille has a dominance in tomato. So unless you've got extremely good quality tomato, as you can see, I don't know if you can see at the bottom, but this is not tomato juice at the bottom. So what I'm doing, I'm going to basically finish the sauce off. I've got here a tomato sauce, an Italian homemade passata. Okay. And I'm going to just stir that through gently because it's extremely fragile, just to give that extra tomato-y mixture and Italian taste. When I say Italian, actually this is from the south of France. This recipe originates from Nice, which is from the French Riviera. But I'm going to show you two serving suggestions for you at home. So the serving suggestion, number one, this is the home version. So really the non-pretentious served as a side, you put it on the table, a little bit of basil. It's plain, it's simple. It goes very well with fish and white meats. And now for the gourmet version of the ratatouille. What can we do for the gourmet? If you're a recipe, a menu for one, a little lunch for one. So I'm going to use that terracotta dish over here, maybe put a little bit of the juices from the actual cooking juice. It's nice and juicy. All right. Maybe with that, we're going to add some fennel and cumin seeds, which is always nice. Not too many. And of course, when you think about juice, you think maybe about, let's say, some French bread. I've toasted some bread in olive oil. That's going to go perfectly with all this. And of course, to finish, we can use our little piece of basil. And this is how I would serve a little menu for one for a vegetarian. Isn't that lovely? Anyway, guys, that completes the video of the day. It's a simple recipe. I hope you enjoy it. And like always, if you like the channel, please comment, subscribe. You're all welcome. We had plenty of new subscribers, actually 1,000 subscribers last week, which has been amazing. So yeah, keep coming back, and we're going to make some more great recipes. Have a good day. Have a good evening, whenever you watch this, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.