Delicious Ratatouille

So I decided that I felt like trying Ratatouille. I have to admit it is because of the Disney movie. So I did a google search on Ratatouille, and after weeding through websites about the movie, I found a couple recipes. The recipes for this dish are almost all the same, same ingredients but some recipes had it as more of a stew rather than a bake (yup, like what was in the movie). I wanted to do a bake, so I picked a recipe from Allrecipes. This dish was very good on its own served with some steamed white rice, but would be really good paired with some kielbasa or another type of sausage.

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp olive oil (I used about 4 tbsp because the eggplant sucked it all up)
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tsp dried parsley
• 1 eggplant, cut into 1/2" cubes
• Salt to taste
• 1 c grated Parmesan cheese (I used about 1/3c to cut back on fat)
• 2 Zucchini, sliced (I used 1 zucchini and 1 yellow squash)
• 1 large onion, sliced into rings
• 2 c sliced fresh mushrooms (I used whole shiitake mushrooms)
• 1 green bell pepper, sliced
• 2 large tomatoes, sliced

Directions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Coat bottom and sides of casserole dish with 1tbsp of the olive oil (I used my Pyrex glass deep pie dish and it was perfect).
• Heat remaining olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Saute garlic until it is lightly browned. Mix in parsley and eggplant. Saute until eggplant is soft, about 10 minutes. Season with salt to taste.
• Spread eggplant mixture evenly across bottom of prepared casserole dish. Sprinkle some of the parmesan cheese over eggplant. Layer zucchini/squash in an even layer over the eggplant. Lightly salt and sprinkle more parmesan cheese. Continue layering in this fashion with onion, mushroom, bell pepper and tomatoes covering each layer with salt and parmesan cheese.
• Bake in preheated oven for 45 minutes.