Saturday, September 14, 2013

Wood Oven Cooking "Ratatouille"

I had always thought that Ratatouille would make a good WFO dish so we decided to try it out. I poked around the internet and found a great recipe over at SmittenKitchen.com. I love the movie Ratatouille and the design of the dish in the movie was really nice. When I read the part of the recipe where the writer said "I also can’t believe I cooked a cartoon dish created by an imaginary rat." I thought, "Sounds like my kind of guy..uh girl...woman...person..whatever you get my point. So here we go...
   First I seasoned some tomato puree with garlic, basil, salt and pepper
Spread about a cup in the bottom of a skillet. (If you don't have a cover for your skillet you might want to use a dutch oven or something for this dish) Next I thin sliced 1/2 an onion and sprinkled them over the bottom of the pan and drizzled with olive oil


Next I quartered an eggplant longways and then alternated thin sliced yellow squash, zucchini, red and orange bell pepper and eggplant

This goes faster than you might think. Here is the finished product going into the oven



I chopped a little more basil and sprinkled it over the top heated the oven to a good honest 400F covered the pan and put it in for ~50 minutes.
And there ya go

I served this with a little goat cheese over the top mushroom couscous and a pork tenderloin with Caribbean spices. It was good. 

The grape arbor

My family tells me that no outdoor kitchen is complete without a grape arbor so.....

The plan is for a raised gravel bed inside a retaining wall with planters for grapes in 3 corners and a set of steps leading out to the yard with flower beds on both sides

First we put in a drain to route the water off the carport into the pond




















Next we excavated a level base for the retaining wall



The PVC risers are for drip irrigation for the grapes and other plants not shown here is a pressure supply line for misters in the arbor overhead. We're in Texas so everything is about the summer heat










I dry stacked one corner to check the elevation and since it was spot on I thought I'd leave it at that















Next I stacked the wall. I made it 3 courses before I decided I needed to play World of Tanks for a while. 










Next time I'll do the 4th course, the steps and the planter boxes







Here is one of the planter boxes going in

Next we fill it up

We were working with unsorted gravel so...

First we filled with this














Then we  screened out fines like this













Which gets you this













And this














And finally this














While this goes to the new rock garden