Pretty Side Veggies

It would seem from my near-radio silence on this blog that I may not have been cooking much recently, and many of you would be sympathetic, imagining that in my current state I am spending much more time with my feet up than planted firmly on the kitchen floor.

And yet...cooking is happening. It's happening with frequency, and in some cases, with results I continue to be really happy with. What isn't happening is the coordination of photos, recipes, and sitting down to write at the computer to transmit the message.

But here is an opportunity too good to pass up. An image already uploaded by Mr. Toujours-Delish. A recipe so easy, I don't need to be near my cookbooks to tell you about it. And pretty enough to bring to a holiday function, in our case, a lovely family dinner hosted by Mr. TD's sis in Berkeley!


This is, according to the Barefoot Contessa, a tian. Tian is a word that means cosmos, sky, heavens in Chinese, and apparently also refers to this type of French veggie dish. She shares the recipe here.

Here's how we made it:

Fry up an onion and some garlic until translucent. Line the bottom of the roasting dish with it.

Chop up a variety of round vegetables to roughly the same thickness. We used potatoes of a wide variety of colors - pink, yellow, purple, and white - as well as Chinese eggplant, which are smaller versions of the big purple kind, tomatoes, and zucchini.

Drizzle with olive oil. Season. Add a fresh herb or two (we used rosemary instead of thyme).

Bake for half an hour to forty minutes to cook the veggies somewhat.

Grate cheese ALL over it (2 oz. of cheese is NOTHING - grate the whole slab onto it if you want). Add a bit more salt and pepper.

Bake until gloriously browned and cheesy.

Word to the wise - these vegetables all let off a lot of water when they roast. As such, this dish didn't travel as well as we had hoped. The back seat of the car ended up with a rosemary-infused oil slick. But the veggies were still tasty.