When Tuscany Meets Provence

As a travel advisor, I plan trips for clients wanting to visit France. I also plan trips for clients wanting to visit Itay. But for some reason, nobody has asked me to plan a trip that visits both France and Italy. As a home cook, that same divide exists in my kitchen. I cook French style dishes, and I cook Italian style dishes, but I don’t cook any dish that combines French and Italian style cuisines. Except by accident, which is what happened recently when I tried to come up with a new take on ratatouille. When Tuscany met Provence.

My ratatouille is not the kind you see on Instagram. It is not a work of culinary art with uniformly shaped veggie slices that look like poker chops carefully arranged by someone with OCD and a ruler. No. My ratatouille is a chop and toss classic Provençal dish cooked in a La Creuset enameled cast iron pot. It is messy, it is rustic, and it is a delicious and hearty veggie stew. It is what ratatouille should be. Not an appetizer, or a side dish, but a meal unto itself. Yet when I came across a recipe for ratatouille that called for laying veggie slices flat onto a sheet of puff pastry that was smeared with Dijon and a blend of goat cheese, cream cheese, basil, parsley, and chives, I thought…hmm…delicious and pretty. I must try this!

I don’t have the best track record when it comes to experimenting in my kitchen, but every now and then I come up with something worth adding to my repertoire. I hoped this would be one of those times.

My first step was to customize the recipe to my palate, as I usually do when trying something new. I kept the Dijon, cut out the goat cheese and reduced the amount of cream cheese…because I wasn’t going for a tart meets creamy, calorie-laden fat bomb. I kept the basil the recipe called for but swapped out the parsley and chives for marjoram, oregano, and thyme…because I wanted layered warmth, earthiness, and aromatic herbal complexity. Then I spent two hours with my mandolin (the kitchen instrument, not the musical instrument) cutting vegetables into nearly identical 1/8‑inch slices…because apparently, I hate myself.

I laid the veggie slices out on paper towels and covered them with more paper towels to absorb some of the moisture and let them rest for about an hour. It might have been 45 minutes, I don’t know. I didn’t time it. My La Creuset was not the proper tool for this task, so once I had the recipe adjusted to my liking and the veggies sliced and set aside to dry, I rolled out the puff pastry on parchment paper and transferred it to a rimmed sheet pan.

Despite the care I took with the mandolin, garden fresh vegetables don’t come in perfectly formed shapes like the components of an IKEA furniture kit. And as any Provençal home cook would agree, you don’t throw out a perfectly good eggplant just for being shaped like…well, an eggplant. So, when it came time to lay out the veggies slices on the puff pastry, I embraced the asymmetry of real veggies and used them anyway, accepting the resulting visual chaos they brought to my dish.

Before baking, I sprinkled everything with Penzey’s “Tuscan Sunset” herb blend: more basil, oregano and thyme to go along with what I mixed with the cream cheese, with the added punch of red bell pepper, fennel, garlic, black pepper, and anise. In the interests of authenticity, I suppose I should have used Herbes de Provence. But to my palate Herbes de Provence belong in sachets, not on dinner plates.

An hour in the oven at 375 degrees and 15 minutes on the cooling rack and voilà. It smelled heavenly as it baked, and the finished product tasted even better. It was delicious. But it wasn’t ratatouille. It tasted a bit like ratatouille, but more like a thin crust veggie pizza. That was probably thanks to the Tuscan Sunset blend of herbs I used.

And that’s how I accidentally discovered what happens when Provence meets Tuscany in the kitchen. You get pizzatouille. I don’t count this among my many kitchen failures. True, I started out trying to improve on my ratatouille and ended up with…well, not ratatouille. But it was not a failure. It was a happy accident that resulted in something completely unexpected, and totally delicious.