“It smells like weird Mexican food in here,” Jamie said as she walked in the door. She wasn’t wrong. The example image sets a rustic farm tone with the watering can, basket of red peppers, and parmesan cheese in the background. The watering can even has onions painted on it. Awesome!
When I saw that it will need reheating before eating, I decided to make this dish in a large rectangle Pyrex. I made this recipe at half size to accommodate the baking dish. I only used two onions because Simply Delicious bases the number of onions on the smaller onions that were available when these recipes were written. Two was more than enough.
The suggestions in the TIPS section is really helpful. Adding almost any kind of vegetable would have bulked this dish out and made it more distinct than just plain vegetable fajitas.
This dish had relatively few ingredients. There’s three onions in this photo, but after I sliced two, I felt I had enough to complete the dish.
This knife makes quick work of the onions. I sliced them as thin as possible.
After the butter melted, I added the onions to the pan and started slicing the peppers. I tried to slice them as thinly as I sliced the onion so it will all cook evenly once they go into the baking dish together.
Mission accomplished, but some of my onions burned while I was slicing.
The onion at this stage was turning soft and slightly brown. Some of the onion burned and I pulled those bits out. In retrospect, I wished I cooked these longer so they all got softer. These were a little under done.
The next step is to create a sauce for the vegetables. The recipe calls for cream, but I just used milk. I followed the instructions and mixed some flour into some water and poured that into the milk to thicken the sauce.
I sprayed the dish so the peppers and onions wouldn’t stick to the sides. In this photo, I’ve just added the first layer of onions, peppers, and seasonings.
Look at it boil! After the milk came to a boil, I cooked it down for a few minutes until it got thick enough to form the sauce.
After I added the second layer of vegetables and seasonings, I added the sauce to the dish. I feel like the recipe didn’t yield enough sauce. Maybe I mis-measured, but it didn’t affect the final quality of the dish that much.
A quick sprinkling of paprika gets applied to the veggies before I pop this dish into the preheated 350 degree toaster oven. The kitchen smelled vaguely of fajitas while it baked.
I’m loving the look of the layers and that bubbly brown top. I hope it tastes half as good as it looks in this photo.
This dish was great fresh out of the oven. Reheated, not so much. It lacked the pop and snap of being freshly cooked and the cheese just melted down to nothing. I ended up tossing the rest of this recipe, but it would make a good vegetable side dish for a larger meal. I wouldn’t recommend serving this as a main course unless you are feeding some skinny vegetarians who don’t care they they will leave hungry.
GRADE: C+
