Ratatouille sandwich

If you have squash, eggplants, bell peppers, onions and/or tomatoes there's an easy way to use them up. Make ratatouille. This dish, which is like a vegan stew, originated in southern France and has kept the French name everywhere it goes.

Traditionally, ratatouille requires all four of these vegetables and roasting some of them for an hour. Traditionally, it is served over rice or noodles.But who cares about tradition?

I did not when I found a recipe for a ratatouille sandwich in my Panini cookbook. I knew that even though the recipe called for bell peppers and zucchini, I only had crookneck squash (and pattypans, which will hopefully be added to another recipe another day) and jalapenos, along with one eggplant. This recipe called for a single small onion, but unless you want to count green onions, I didn't have these either.

I further reduced my need for tradition, or even following a recipe, when I looked in the fridge and found that we only had three small, sorry-looking tomatoes left. We got good use out of the rest. And since I now wasn't following the recipe with four of the five called-for vegetables. The tomatoes and onions were eliminated all together, the squash and peppers had alternate varieties.

Further research into my refrigerator's contents made for yet another change to the recipe. We are beyond what is traditional here, since you usually don't add ham, cheese and sandwich bread to your ratatouille. Because this is what was in my refrigerator, I only added one slice of ham to each sandwich and a little Mozarella cheese. Also, since I didn't have any French bread (just wheat) but did have some sandwich rolls in the freezer, I left the panini maker in the appliance cupboard and toasted the buns in the toaster oven instead.

My recipe described this creation as as a ham and cheese sandwich with ratatouille. My sandwiches were more ratatouille sandwiches with a little ham (one slice each) and a little cheese. I have enough ratatouille left over to do this again, but I'm going to need French bread for another recipe. I also may get more ham, and some Gruyere cheese, which is closer to the obscure type of cheese the recipe called for.

As usual, most of my vegetables were from Unity Farm. However, my crookneck squash is from somebody's back yard garden. I don't have much room on the patio of my condo to grow stuff, but if you have a real back yard, you could have at least a few vegetables without even going to "the farm." Tomatoes, squash and peppers are all good things to grow in a back yard garden, and you might try eggplant too.