Grilled Ratatouille

 Are you ever surprised by a dish?  We thought this grilled ratatouille (which we served with Alex's Roast Chicken Breasts) would be good since we had wonderful produce, but neither of us expected to like it quite as much as we did because it was so very simple.  I don't know what the French traditionally serve with ratatouille, but this worked so brilliantly with the roast chicken breasts that I am not sure I would serve it with anything else.  It was easy to make and very tasty.  We have a ton of leftovers, but I am excited to try the ratatouille ladled over a bed of pasta or couscous or as a topping for some good crusty bread.  I wonder what else I should do with my leftover ratatouille?  Before summer wraps up I plan on making this at least once more.  This ratatouille might become my new go-to side dish for our roast chicken breasts.  The go-to side dish used to be a simple arugula salad, but so long as the fresh basil, tomatoes and zucchini remain available at the farmers' market, I am going to make ratatouille!

Recipe after the jump!

Zucchini Souffle

 

I was feeling particularly ambitious today and decided to make a zucchini souffle for lunch.  I have no idea what inspired me to make a souffle.  It's one of the few things that I have stayed away from in the kitchen.  I don't want to say that souffles intimidate me, but that's definitely part of it.  In all honestly, the main reason that I stay away from souffles is that I'm just not certain that they are really worth the effort.  It takes a lot of work (and a lot of mixing bowls) to make this dish.  But every once in awhile you have to really push yourself.  This is probably the last souffle I will be making for awhile.  Don't get me wrong, it was delicious.  But man we used up nearly every utensil and bowl in the kitchen to prepare this dish.  And it took awhile to put it together.  If I were to make the dish again, I would probably mince the onion because I thought in some ways the chopped pieces of onion detracted a teensy bit from the light and fluffy souffle.  While the zucchini and cheese melted into the souffle, the onions didn't.  I might also consider adding a touch of fresh thyme because I think that zucchini and thyme pair very well together.  I thought that the flat-leaf parsley was a nice addition, but I think that a touch of thyme would be even nicer.

Recipe after the jump!

Easy Sole Meuniere

For the first time this month, I didn't have to work on a Sunday.  It was blissful.  I went to the gym, we cleaned the apartment (not so blissful, but necessary), we ran errands...  It was a wonderfully productive and only semi-lazy Sunday.  And so I celebrated by cooking dinner!  Actually, we made lunch too but as I have already posted about the Tunisian Soup with Chard and Egg Noodles, there is no need to post about it again.  But since dinner was a random recipe that I have been wanting to try, I get to post about that!

Sole Meuniere is a classic French dish that is often made of Dover Sole and costs a fortune at some fancy French restaurants. I'm not sure if the Dover Sole itself is extremely expensive, but I figure that it must be since the rest of the ingredients are cheap.  Since I don't have a fortune to spend, I often avoid the dish entirely.  But as Fairway had some really nice lemon sole fillets when I swung by yesterday, I decided to go home and make it myself.  And it is both remarkably easy to make (not to mention quick cooking - as the sole only takes about 4-5 minutes total to cook through), and remarkably tasty.  I have tried other meuniere recipes with capers in them, which provides a nice salty bite to the dish, but I might actually prefer the dish without capers as the capers detract from the delicate flavor of the sole.  Then again, sometimes I do want big bold flavors and the capers would be perfect.  So I guess you can adapt this recipe to taste and either add some minced capers when you add the lemon juice, or just leave them out entirely like I did here.  Either way the dish is light, but still very flavorful.  If you're not a big fan of lemon, then you could cut back on the amount of lemon juice, or if you want to lighten the dish you could use half butter and half evoo.  But the recipe is simple enough and uses such easily recognizable flavors/ingredients that you can play with it pretty easily to suit your tastes.

Recipe after the jump!