Summer Veggie Saute

Anthony and I were very excited to start our first veggie garden this year & we have been harvesting delicious squash, zucchini, eggplant, and cucumbers for a couple of months. Since we are new to gardening and tomatoes are one of Anthony’s favorite summer foods, I planted five of them in our garden.  Our garden is now teeming with ripe / almost ripe tomatoes and we aren’t sure what to do with them all. I removed the seeds from one batch and cooked them down to freeze them & we froze a second batch of blemish free ’maters whole.  Last night I made this recipe for fresh tomato basil sauce with some of the basil harvested from our garden.  I will be freezing that sauce to use with meatballs or other gluten free meals in the future.

Then tonight, we decided to saute up some veggies in butter and enjoy them with dinner.  This is similar to Ratatouille, but I just improvised and through things together in a skillet (posting this here for my future reference as much as anything):

Ingredients:

1/2 stick butter
1 whole onion
1 whole zucchini
1 whole yellow squash
1 t Italian seasoning
1 t salt
1 1/2 t fresh garlic
1/2 t black pepper
5 tomatoes with skins and seeds removed, finely chopped

Melt the butter over medium heat in a large skillet. Finely dice onion and toss with butter until coated.  Add salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning.  Cook until onions are translucent and lightly brown. In the meantime, dice zucchini and squash into small chunks.  Throw zucchini in and cook until lightly brown and tender (or longer if desired).  I allowed all of the veggies to continue to cook while prepping the tomatoes, which was probably 10-15 minutes. Don’t forget to stir to allow even cooking! I blanched the tomatoes and then submerged them in cold water to remove the skins easily, then cut them in half to scoop out the seeds.  After a rough dice, they joined the other veggies in the pan.  I then made a little opening in the center of the veggies to lightly saute the garlic before mixing everything together and allowing it to simmer for 5 more minutes.

It wasn’t pretty, but it was delicious. Next time I will have to take some photos to share here.