Gratin de Tomate, Courgette et Chèvre à la Myriam

I can trace the genesis of my love of food and cooking to my year in France. During that time I learned that contrary to my childhood prejudices, tomatoes and cheese were wonderful things, that there are few better ways to spend a saturday morning than at an outdoor market and that an evening is best spent in a kitchen with good friends and a bottle of wine. As a child I was an extremely picky eater and stubborn, a bad combination for any parent trying to feed a family. My mother, however, never forced me to eat things I didn't want to and kept telling herself (and me) that someday I would move to a foreign country and come back eating all sorts of new and different things. How's that for foresight?

I arrived in France an abhorrer of cheese, tomato and salad dressing and left with an appreciation for all things culinary. Except meat, of course, which the French never managed to convince me was worth eating. Part of this transformation came at the feet, or rather in the kitchen, of a good family friend, Myriam Rey. Myriam and the rest of the Reys met my family when Jean-Michel, the father/husband, brought them to live at FermiLab for a year while he worked with my dad. When I spent a year in France they became my family away from home. Myriam cooks with the quintessential grace of the french home cook. Every thing is simple, fresh, delicious and prepared seemingly without effort. She made something like dish I'm sharing with you in this post when I visited them last summer while working at CERN. It's perfect for the summer when tomatoes and squash are abundant. We got some beautiful Romas and zucchini in our box this week so I couldn't resist making it.

Gratin de Tomate, Courgette et Chèvre à la Myriam

4 long or 5 to 6 normal sized roma or other firm tomatoes
2 medium or 3 small zucchini (courgette)
4 oz log of goat cheese

1 cup of brown rice
1.5-2.5 cups of water or vegetable broth

1 lg or 2 small white or yellow onions, cut in half and thinly sliced
1-1.5 cups of thinly sliced mushrooms (brown is better)
3 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
2 tbsp olive oil
1/3 cup of white wine

herbs, fresh or dried, for garnish
coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 F and lightly oil the inside of a 9x13in baking dish.

Start the rice cooking in the broth either on the stove or in a rice cooker.

Heat the oil in a skillet to medium heat and add the pressed garlic. Cook for a couple of minutes, stirring frequently, then add the onions. After about 8 minutes, add the wine, two minutes later add the mushrooms and a pinch or two of salt. Cook until the onions are translucent and the mushrooms are beginning to brown, about 15 more minutes.

In the meantime slice the tomatoes and the zucchini into thin rounds of approximately the same size. Keep the cheese in the fridge until you are assembling the dish.

Once the rice is cooked add it to the onions and stir until combined. Then scoop the mixture in to the baking dish, smoothing till it forms a flat layer. Get the log out of the fridge and remove the wrapping. You'll be slicing off a round the size of the vegetables one at a time

Start laying the vegetables and cheese slices on top of the rice, alternating tomato and zucchini twice then cheese: zucchini-tomato-zucchini-tomato-cheese-zucchini-tomato-zucchini-tomato-cheese, etc. Do a full row and the start the next with tomato. The picture should be worth a thousand explanations in this case.


If you are using dried herbs, sprinkle some on now, along with salt and pepper. I sprinkled a bit of herbs de provence and then used some fresh ones after it was cooked.

Put the dish in the oven and cook for at least 3o minutes. You can check on it at 30 and if the zucchini don't look cooked enough, let it go longer, possibly up to an hour. The time to cook depends on the thickness of the slices, I think mine took 45 min to bake.

Sprinkle with fresh herbs (I had basil and parsley lying around but any herb should work). Serve carefully, it has a tendency to fall apart. And enjoy!
Here is a photo from the original Myriam made last summer. She added some sort of sausage in the meat eater version and used the wonderful french chèvre which has a rind. I can only find it in the US for exhorbitant prices, so I usually use the rind-less Trader Joe's version. She also exhibited greater patience or better planning than I and most likely cooked hers for an hour.