Easy and Beautiful Ratatouille Spiral!

Hello gorgeous! What a fantastic dish for company, right? It looks so elegant yet it is REALLY easy to make. Ratatouille is a French dish traditionally made as a stew, with the ingredients generally containing zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, garlic, onion and tomatoes.

I've been dying to make this pretty version since I first saw one on Pinterest, like a year ago. Waiting and waiting for just the right veggies. So I went to my Farmer's Market today and lo and behold… everything I needed! Yay. Got right to work. I used a mandolin for some of it, but the eggplant was a little too tough and rubbery and, frankly, I'm a little scared of that thing! It is SO sharp. I also hand-cut the tomatoes and the peppers, so really all I used the mandolin for was the yellow squash and the zucchini. For the peppers, slice them in half, lengthways, remove the seeds and then cut in the opposite direction to make your slices.

The most tedious part of this recipe is slicing all the veggies and creating the spiral. Don't worry about making an actual spiral, mine was more like concentric circles and it still looked great. To help with arranging, so you don't get lost, what I did was to make a little stack of the veggies in the order I wanted them in, and put them on end in a little cup. Then I could just look at that stack and know where I was.

Use whatever veggies you like but this is what I used, and I didn't even really measure so these are approximates. If you wind up with extra veggies, make a Minestrone Soup!

Ingredients:

2 medium green zucchini
2 medium yellow squash
4 medium Chinese eggplant (I found 2 different color varieties, one very dark purple and one that was a beautiful almost magenta color—see photo below)
3 small tomatoes (Roma is best but I couldn't find them so I just found some small ones that worked)
2 small red bell peppers
about 10 very small cherry tomatoes (actually I found some that are even smaller at the Farmer's Market called "spoon tomatoes" … so cute!)
1 26-oz. jar of your favorite tomato sauce

Directions:

I used a cast iron skillet but you can use any round baking vessel, such as a casserole dish or even a deep dish pie plate would work.
Lightly oil the pan or skillet and spread half of the sauce in the bottom.
Slice all the veggies thin (about ¼" or so).
Arrange the veggies in a spiral pattern starting at the outside and working in.
Top with the remaining sauce and the cherry tomatoes.
Bake at 350° F for one hour.