Stuff Casserole, Your Produce Savior

I'd like to introduce you to a favorite concept of mine: Stuff Casserole. When I'm feeling too lazy to come up with something creative, or when I find that I don't have quite the right ingredients for a recipe that I want to try, I revert to my old standby: Stuff Casserole.

Just as with Everything Soup, the concept is simple: take an inventory of the vegetables and herbs in your kitchen that need to be used up pretty soon (I always buy too much produce, so this is a common problem for me). Ask yourself how many of their flavors are complementary, and then get cracking.

This week's stuff casserole was more or less a ratatouille, combining yellow squash, tomatoes, eggplant, and rosemary, but I could have easily added sliced carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, etc. I also added crumbled feta (we prefer the somewhat expensive Valbreso feta, because it's made with sheep's milk) in between the layers, and topped the whole thing with tomato sauce and a grating of a hard Greek sheep's milk cheese called Mizithra.

 
The point is to slather the ingredients of your Stuff Casserole with tomato sauce and cheese so that, really, you could be serving Cardboard Casserole and it would taste good.

Depending on which veggies you've chosen to cook, your cooking time could range from 30 to 45 minutes, at 400 degrees. This version of Stuff Casserole took me about 40 minutes.

Stuff Casserole can work as a side dish, or an easy vegetarian lunch. The best part is that you aren't wasting your money having to toss out produce that you haven't gotten around to cooking yet.