After having spent a week in the Basque Country with Mark, I immediately came home and bought a cookbook, of course. I ended up with a beautifully photographed book, The Basque Table by Alexandra Raij (a Minnesotan!) and her Basque husband, Eder Montero. I probably won’t make many of the seafood recipes, for lack of ingredients, but fortunately the book has many dishes of eggs, meats, vegetables, and desserts.
The first thing I made was so beautiful that I must share it immediately. It is pisto, a Basque ratatouille, which I adapted as suggested by the authors to locally available ingredients. I found guaijillo peppers packed in small plastic boxes in the local upscale grocery store; lacking them, omit them, or you might try a quarter cup or so of puree of roasted red peppers?
We ate this topped with pan-sauteed fish and sourdough bread.
Also, at the bottom: how to use the leftovers in delicious scrambled eggs.
Basque Ratatouille (adapted from The Basque Book)
- 0.75 oz dried guajillo peppers, about 4 peppers
- 2 cups diced Vidalia onion
- 1 tsp dried marjoram
- 3/8 tsp cayenne pepper, divided
- Olive oil
- Salt
- 1 cup diced red bell pepper (1/4” dice)
- 1 cup diced green bell pepper (1/4” dice)
- 4 pounds zucchini, cut into 1/4”-thick half moons)
- 1 cup hand-crushed canned whole tomatoes with juices
First, make a pepper puree:
Preheat oven to 350° F (you will raise the temperature later). Begin to bring a saucepan of lightly salted water to a boil.
Toast the dried peppers until fragrant for 2 to 5 minutes, until fragrant and pliable. Remove the seeds and stems from the warm peppers. Put the toasted, seeded peppers in the boiling water, turn off the heat, cover, and let steep 20 minutes. Puree the hydrated peppers with just enough of the soaking water to make a puree. Half of this puree will be used in this recipe, and the other half you can reserve for another use. (The soaking water makes a vegetarian stock.)
While the peppers steep, raise the oven temperature to 500° F.
In a dutch oven or other soup pot with a lid, combine the onion, marjoram, 1/8 tsp cayenne, 3 Tbsp oil, and 1/tsp salt and gently cook the onion over low heat for about 20 min until soft and translucent.
Meanwhile, in a large bowl, toss the red and green peppers and the zucchini with 1.5 tsp salt and 4 Tbsp oil. Roast the vegetables on two large baking sheets, stirring halfway, for 15 min.
Add the peppers and zucchini to the onion, with a little more oil if necessary, and cook for two minutes. Turn up the heat to medium; add the tomatoes and half the guajillo pepper puree that you made in the first step. (Save the rest.)
Stir, cover, and place in a 250° oven for a couple of hours.
Before serving, check the flavors; the mixture should be dark and sweet, and if it is not qute yet, cook it on the stove top for a few more minutes, stirring. Add the remainder of the cayenne and serve.
Scrambled Eggs For One With Leftover Ratatouille
Warm about a half cup of ratatouille in a small nonstick saucepan with a film of olive oil. When the ratatouille is warm, lightly beat 2 eggs with a pinch of salt; move the ratatouille to one side of the pan, add another tablespoon of oil to the empty side, and pour the eggs in. Let set for ten seconds then gently stir, incorporating some of the ratatouille. Let set again, and continue gently stirring until the eggs are softly scrambled and roughly mixed with the ratatouille. Turn out and eat — crusty bread is a nice addition.
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