Summer Vegetable Gratin- April 11

This past Sunday, Hunter and I were invited over to Anne Marie's new, beautiful, "i'm-ridiculously-jealous-of-how-much-sunlight-and-space-you-have-in-nyc" apartment. We were having a pot luck dinner to celebrate her birthday.

Hunter and I signed up to bring a side dish and prepared a bright, colorful dish to match the bright, colorful personality of our dinner party: Summer Vegetable Gratin (p. 202)

Now, we were a little nervous about preparing and blogging about this dish because:
1- Thomas Keller accompanies this recipe in the book with a brilliant, glossy two-page photo spread of this dish broken down (talk about some pressure to make our dish look good)
2- Our friends, Phil & Marie (who decided to purchase this cookbook after hearing me rave about it for weeks) cooked up this dish successfully the week before (that would be embarrassing if after all my talk about blogging through this cookbook this ended in the same demise as our aioli attempt).
3- We were going to be sharing this with our friends and frankly, were going to be cutting it close on time.  There was no room for error on this one.

Luckily, our dish turned out beautifully.

I've never found it difficult to get lots of veggies into my diet, but with Hunter it's the other way around.  He was a little skeptical whether he'd really enjoy a dish made with so many veggies, included tomatoes (definitely not high up on his list), and had so little cheese.

We hand-sliced all of the veggies: roma tomatoes, butternut squash, zucchini, and japanese eggplant.  I was excited about using my brand-new mandolin slicer only to realize with utmost disappointment that its settings sliced veggies that were too thin for this dish.  At least I got to work on my knife skills.

Hunter carefully layered the veggies in our baking dish and topped each layer with parmesan cheese and fresh breadcrumbs we made from a loaf of duckfat-garlic-bread (yes...duckfat).

...we threw it in the oven, et voila! DELICIOUS summer vegetable gratin!

Over at Anne Marie's, we popped open some bubbly, sat down at her new dining table, and enjoyed our dish with Anne Marie's flavor-packed sausage and peppers and asparagus.  yum.

 

Yuck or Yum:
Summer Vegetable Gratin (p 202): d- "really incredible. definitely a dish I'd make when entertaining company. I'd probably include more onions and watch them more closely so they don't come as close to burning!" h-"surprised how much i liked it.  i could have done without the tomatoes. maybe we could have replaced them with another veggie."