Anyone Can Cook: Ratatouille Soup
I could easily spend a weekend watching animated Pixar movies. I saw Ratatouille the night before I moved in my freshman year at U of M; we had driven most of the way that day but stopped about an hour short of Ann Arbor. One of my favorite scenes is where .
Probably because my wife has done this with me on occasion in an effort to help me try and extract more of the subtle flavors from things we are eating. She certainly has Remy’s cooking intuition when it comes to flavor combinations while I am . I have not yet endeavored to make the sliced roasted ratatouille like the end of the movie, but I did make this soup a few weeks ago that was quite tasty.
We had a very cool summer and there was no shortage of nights in August and early September where it cooled down into the 40s and 50s at night. A few weeks ago I deemed it the start of soup season and made this ratatouille soup using lots of the veggies we got in our CSA box from Frog Holler Farm.
This is a great soup to make when you have lots of different veggies and greens you are trying to use up. The recipe I used calls for peppers, onions, zucchini, and eggplant but you could add almost anything else that you have on hand. It also gave me an opportunity to use a chunk of basil leaves from the plant that we have growing next to our window.
You know what immediately makes a bowl of soup better? Being able to mop it up with a chunk of a fresh baguette. This is the start of all things fall; we went apple picking this weekend and I have already bought a few pumpkins to roast! Enjoy the soup!
- 2 onions, diced
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 Tbsp herbes de Provence
- 1 eggplant, diced
- 2 peppers (any color), diced
- 1 zucchini, diced
- 28 oz crushed tomatoes
- ½ C basil leaves, chopped
- 2 C vegetable broth
- 1 tbsp salt
- Drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. When hot add in onion and garlic and cook for 5 minutes.
- Add in the herbes de provence and salt in addition to all of the remaining vegetables. Stir frequently and cook for another 7-10 minutes.
- Add the tomatoes, broth, and basil and bring to a boil. Once boiling reduce the heat to a simmer for 20 minutes.
- If you would like to create a smoother soup use an immersion blender to puree some of the soup, otherwise it is ready to serve.
