This recipe is a gardener’s best friend. It looks and feels like a warm Italian evening on an elegant piazza, but is so carefree! I often take my baking dish into the garden, fill it with cherry tomatoes, basil, oregano, summer squash, eggplant, or whatever assortment is ripe and put it into my oven! We eat it smeared on garlic toast like a warm bruschetta or tossed into pasta for a full meal, and I’ve been known to eat it straight from the pan.
6 cups of assorted ripe vegetables, such as peppers, onion, tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, etc. roughly chopped to 1”.
1 clove of garlic, roughly chopped
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 TBSP fresh oregano
6-7 large basil leaves
3 TBSP olive oil
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese or crumbled feta
Stir all ingredients together and place in baking dish.
Roast at 400 degrees for 1 hour.
Serve over fresh pasta and top with cheese.
These beautiful images are by Jordan Durbin and used with her permission for The Cultivating Project.
Jordan Elise Durbin is a cultivator of five wondrous children, a slightly out of control garden, and a small-but-efficient pottery studio. Her laundry piles can attest to her many activities and willingness to do anything but manage said piles. She can frequently be found running Ohio’s magical trails with her children, baking large quantities of buttery goodness, and writing about the woes and wonders of medieval chickenry. She is the author of The Chicken Pox: A Feathery Retelling of Hansel and Gretel, Periwinkle, and The Prodigal Fox. She has contributed to Cultivating since 2018. Jordan is the curator for the column “Cultivating A Maker’s Life”. She looks for the glory of God in every corner of creation and regularly finds it.
Hi Jordan, your taking your baking dish to the garden reminds me of simpler days over twenty years ago, when our then three years old daughter, charis, would completely abandon her little ‘reaping basket’ and squat in our tiny strawberry patch eating away. 😄 ‘joie de vivre’!
Blessings!