RATATOUILLE (NIGERIAN INTERPRETATION)

You've been warned. If you're after a classic ratatouille recipe then Google has done you wrong and you need to go ahead and hit that back button on your browser. Otherwise, if you're here intentionally or if I've remotely piqued your interest, then stick around for my Nigerian interpretation of this well-known French Provençal dish.
My co-worker and I were recently discussing how much we love the Disney Pixar movie 'Ratatouille', which is about a rat with some mad cooking skills. It's got the perfect blend of humour, sentiment and drop-dead gorgeous animations of food (and Paris...but mostly food). If you haven't seen it yet, stop everything you're doing and go watch it! Or watch Remy the rat in action in the short clip below:

My coworker and I plan to recreate the traditional version at work one of these days, but I couldn't resist putting my spin on it first. 

If you follow me on Facebook and Twitter, you'll know that I'm tackling NaNoWriMo again this year and making this dish provided a much needed break from the novel I'm working on. Not to mention that cooking never fails to inspire me and aid my thinking process.

Hope you have as much fun making this as I did. And don't forget to leave me a comment if you like what you see :)

Ingredients

(serves 2)

- 1 small, narrow sweet potato (peeled; thinly sliced)

- 1 plantain (thinly sliced)

- 1-2 small tomatoes (thinly sliced)

- 1 small red onion (thinly sliced)

For the red sauce:

- 2 tomatoes (chopped)

- 1 red bell pepper 

- 2 cloves garlic

- 1 tbsp olive oil

- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 1/2 small red onion (finely chopped)

- dried thyme

- curry powder

- salt to taste

Blanch the sweet potato slices in a pot of boiling hot water for 5 minutes. Drain and set aside with the rest of your thinly sliced vegetables.

To make the red sauce, blend the tomatoes, red bell pepper and garlic until you have a thick, chunky sauce consistency.

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan and add the red sauce, chopped red onion, tomato paste and a generous pinch of dried thyme and curry powder. Season to taste. Simmer uncovered for 5 minutes.

Grab a small oven dish and spread about 3/4 of the red sauce over the base. Arrange the vegetable slices in an alternating and overlapping pattern all the way around the dish, working your way around the edge and into the centre. Take the remaining red sauce and spoon that over the top of the vegetables.

Cut out greaseproof paper to match the shape and circumference of your oven dish and use it to cover the entire arrangement.

Bake in a pre-heated oven, gas mark 6, for 25 minutes until everything is cooked and tender. Peel off the greaseproof paper and bake for a further 5 minutes just to add some colour to the top.

Serve on its own with sauce drizzled around the plate and extra thyme to garnish, or serve with a few slices of wholegrain bread.

Voilà!