Then, I end up singing this all day.
Then, I want to make some meat loaf.
It's rough.
Anyways, here's a recipe for you if you have a lot of veggies and a decent amount of time.
1. Start with some veggies.
3. Peel the eggplant and cube it. You want it about the size your knuckle to the tip of your finger. Don't cut your finger.
4. Put the eggplant in a colander and toss it with some salt, I don't care how much you use. Place the colander on top of a bowl.
5. Now you are going to want to dice a yellow onion.
You'll want to cut it in halves and leave the hairy end on. That way you can cut a grid onto it and get a nice even dice just by making slices. Like so:
Then just throw those into a bowl.
God, you know what a bowl looks like. Why did I take a picture of that? The danged thing is sideways even.
5. Chop two bell peppers and put them in their own bowl.
Again with the bowl? You people know what a bowl full of peppers looks like, right? Jeez oh peas.
6. Now chop up zucchini and/or squash and put that in a, you guessed it, bowl.
You want at least two zucchini or one zucchini and one squash.
7. Now you want to chop up two tomatoes. Remove the skin from them, if you'd like. It's not really necessary. Guess where you put the tomatoes?
Another bowl. You guys got lots of bowls, right?
8. Now mince a few cloves of garlic and put that in a much smaller bowl.
9. Now, put a little bit of olive oil in a dutch oven or a large pot and heat it up.
10. Saute the onion in the dutch oven with a pinch of salt until they turn from this-
to this-
It takes about 10 minutes on medium.You want the onions to be a little browned.
11. Now toss the bell peppers in with the onions and saute those together for about 5 minutes, just enough time to soften up the peppers.
12. Empty the dutch oven and put the pepper/onion mixture in a large bowl. You have some clean bowls left, right?
13. Add a teaspoon of olive oil into your dutch oven and saute your zucchini and/or squash (with another pinch of salt) for about five minutes.
14. Put that into the pepper and onion bowl. No new bowl! Huzzah!
15. Now remember how you had that eggplant colander in a bowl? Here's why.
All this stuff has come out of the eggplant. Scientists have no idea what it is, but I'm pretty sure you don't want to touch it.
16. Keeping the eggplant in the colander, rinse it off in the kitchen sink.
17. Gently massage the eggplant to wring out any extra water. The eggplant will be glad you did.
18. Toss another teaspoon or two of olive oil into the dutch oven, and saute the eggplant over medium heat for about ten minutes. When it starts to look a little translucent, it's done. Put those in a bowl. You don't need a new bowl once again! Put it in with the onions and peppers and squash.
19. At this point your pot/dutch oven is probably looking like this:
That's okay. You want that. (As long as it is brown and not black and smoking/burning/catching fire.) In the business, we call that glaze.
This is a good time to clean out the glaze a little bit. Put a quarter cup of water in your dutch oven, and scrape the bottom a bit with your spoon or spatula or pancake flipper. (You can use wine, but you know.)
20. After you've loosened up your glaze, pour it over your big bowl of veggies. I hope you didn't use soap to clean it. If you did, don't pour it over the vegetables. The ones in the bowl. You know, the squash and the peppers and the onions.
21. Where the hell was I? Bowls! Right.
22. Put another teaspoon of olive oil in the dutch oven and saute the garlic in it for about a minute. It'll turn yellow and smell really nice.
23. Dump the tomatoes, some black pepper, a bay leaf and a few sprigs of thyme on top of the garlic. Saute those until the tomatoes breakdown a little bit and their juices start bubbling. Going from this:
-to-
24. All right, now dump that bowl of peppers and onions and squash back in the pot with the tomatoes.
25. Toss them around a bit until the peppers and the tomatoes and the squash and the eggplant and all those guys are good friends.
26. Bring it to a good bubble, then reduce to a simmer.
27. Let it simmer for about an hour, give or take half an hour. The veggies are going to break down more the longer you leave them in there, and the flavors are going to mingle a little more. In either case, you'll want to stir the pot and scrape the bottom to prevent too much glaze from building up in the bottom of the pot.
It looks like this after a half an hour.
It looks like this after about 70 minutes:
28. Jesus, it looks like barf.
29. Smells really good though.
30. Cut up some basil leaves into ribbons. You want, essentially, a wide chiffonade.
31. Take it off the heat, put the basil ribbons in and take the bay leaf and thyme out.
32. Serve it in a, you guessed it, BOWL!
33. Use a basil leaf to distract from the fact that it looks like vegetable stew. . . .
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