My New Favorite Sidedish

I have a terrible habit.  I LOVE to cook, but once I make a new recipe, I tend to forget about it completely and usually only end up making it once.  It's the problem with cooking in the internet age.  I remember as a kid seeing my mom mark recipes in her trusty Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook so she'd remember that we liked them and we'd have it again.  Since I usually only cook from memory or an internet search, I never mark anything down and don't have anything to refer back to.  I'm hoping that between my Pinterest pinboards and this blog, I can start to keep track of our family favorites so we can enjoy them again and again. 

We'll start with my new favorite sidedish: Summer Vegetable Tian.  A tian, I learned tonight, is a French dish made of layered fresh vegetables that are then baked to concentrate the flavors.  Well, I'm not French and I don't cook with wine often (I prefer to drink it), so I put my own little Italian spin on it.  You can find the original French recipe here.  But mine took on a little more of the spirit found in the budget-friendly version found here.  I was trying to work mostly with vegetables ready to harvest from our potted garden on our deck, so my basic ingredients were chopped garlic and onions, EVOO, a can of Italian-seasoned diced tomatoes, sliced rounds of summer squash/zucchini, potatoes, onion, and tomato, grated parmesan cheese,  S&P and chopped fresh herbs.  Our porch garden provided me with parsley, rosemary, chives, basil, and thyme, which all worked perfectly, but you could use anything along those lines that's available to you.

The preparation was so simple and fast.  Saute the chopped garlic and onion in EVOO and spread in the bottom of an 8x8 baking dish.  Top with the can of diced tomatoes.  The original recipes didn't call for this, but I was feeling creative and our poor tomato plant on the porch isn't turning out a lot of fruit, so I improvised.  If you have an abundance of fresh, juicy tomatoes on hand, you could eliminate the canned stuff and follow the original recipe.  Create vertical layers of all the sliced vegetable rounds.  (I know I already have onions chopped in the bottom of the dish (1/2 an onion), but I sliced the rest into half-moons and layered them too because I love some big slices of tender baked onions.)  Top with a drizzle of EVOO, a sprinkle of S&P, and a smattering of whatever fresh herbs you have on hand.  Cover with foil and bake for 30 min. at 400 degrees.  Remove the foil, sprinkle with cheese and bake another 15 minutes or until the cheese is browned and the vegetables are tender.

Yummy!  Everyone in our family loved it.  Ian was shoveling it in by the handfuls and reaching for more.  I love when a recipe makes vegetables appealing to my kiddos.