Two-of-everything ratatouille recipe

My first experience of ratatouille was not a happy one. While I was living in Paris, I treated myself to lunch at a little cheap and cheerful café in the Latin Quarter. Served with fresh bread, it was a bowl of acidic, over-salted mush in which the individual vegetables were unidentifiable. Not nice. It completely put me off even the idea of trying it again.

Some years later, when I started growing my own vegetables and had a sudden glut of tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes, I had a go at making it myself, using a few different recipes, until I settled on my version, which has become one of my comfort foods.

Recipe

You will need:

2 onions (I prefer red onions, but whatever you've got)

2 fat cloves of garlic, crushed

2 sweet/bell peppers (I like to go for different colours)

2 courgettes

2 aubergines

2 cans of chopped tomatoes

2 heaped teaspoons vegetable stock (bouillon) powder

A couple of big pinches of dried mixed herbs/herbes de Provence (or a small sprig each of fresh, thyme, rosemary, oregano, sage)

A couple of good glugs of olive oil

salt and ground black pepper to taste.

I  prefer to use one of my Dutch oven pans, heavy, broad-based and deep enough to add all the veg, water to cover (and more if I want it soupier) and not spit broth all over the stove when I lift the lid to give it a stir.

Chop the onions, peppers, aubergines and courgettes into roughly 1"/2.5 cm pieces.

Start cooking the onions and peppers in the olive oil, and add the garlic as they start to colour.

Add the courgettes and aubergines so that they start to cook and soak up the oil.

When the pan looks dry and the vegetables start to catch and colour, add the canned tomatoes. Rinse out the tins with hot water, adding this to the pan so that the vegetables are covered.

Add the herbs and vegetable stock, give it all a good stir, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally if needed to stop it catching on the bottom of the pan.

It may need longer; the vegetables should be soft and melting but still retain their shape.

Serve and enjoy. Fresh baguette or crusty roll, glass of red wine ... or over a baked potato. Or on its own if you are aiming to cut the carbs.

Notes

I find it best to keep the vegetables in proportion, so all medium-sized or all large (hopefully without the aubergines and courgettes being woolly and full of seeds).

Modern aubergine varieties often do not need salting to remove bitter juices, but if you've grown your own and they've been water stressed at all, it can still be a good idea, and do the courgettes at the same time.

It freezes and reheats well, so I wouldn't bother trying to make a small portion with small-sized vegetables, as two cans of tomatoes will be too much, although two big beefsteak tomatoes could work.

I don't know how many this will feed, because I invariably have a second helping, but it usually lasts me at least two days.

If you're feeding a horde you can double the quantities of ingredients.

You can stretch the definition of ratatouille and stretch this further by adding a couple of potatoes cut into 1"/2.5 cm chunks, or stretch it even further by adding more water so that it's more like a soup. Or just go mad and use it as a basis for a big vegetable stew by adding a can of chickpeas or cannellini beans, sweetcorn, chunks of butternut or other squash, increasing and tweaking the seasoning as needed.