Gratin de Courgettes et Tomates, and a Moroccan Bread

I have a bread cookbook that I used to use all the time back in the 1970s when I was . . . not a hippy, really, I was too young for that . . . let’s just say I was a gauze peasant shirt/sandal wearing vegetarian whose big vacation was attending a weeklong “midwifery skills workshop” and though in nursing school and then being a nurse, relied personally on a cupboard of herbs. And yes, I’m aware that is a mondo run-on sentence.

Anyway, the bread book is still one of my favorite books. And yes, I still have a copy of “Laurel’s Kitchen”, but I digress. It’s called The Garden Way Bread Book: A Baker's Almanac . I didn’t buy bread at that time, but used their “Farmhouse Potato Bread” recipe for my everyday bread. I thought of this book when I was thinking about something to round out a veg gratin, and what looked like it would suit was a recipe called “Moroccan Sesame Anise Bread”. Pretty straightforward – mixed whole and plain flour, and the mentioned spices. Dough:



And baked:




I didn’t use an egg-white wash, listed as optional. This is a really blurry pic, sorry, but wanted to show you that it’s a fairly tight/dense crumb:




I took one bite to be able to discuss it! Good bread, and really well suited to a dish like the gratin, for sure. The anise comes through, not obnoxiously, but I didn’t get a sesame hit at all. I’d like to play with that if I make it again. A bit of sesame oil or perhaps grinding some of the seeds.

The gratin was again from Bistro Cooking . We were debating at the dinner table whether this should be called a gratin, since there were no potatoes, or a ratatouille. Perhaps the addition of a cup of parmesan argues more for the former than latter. It was very simple (at least if you own a mandoline) and a very summery dish. Thyme was sprinkled about the top of the veg:




I utterly forgot to get a pic of the finished dish! I doubled the recipe for my big family, and we had about half a pan left for lunches. It re-warms just fine on the stovetop (we don’t have a microwave so I can’t weigh in on how it would re-warm there).
Very summery meal. A fruity drink would have gone well, but Sophia and I were also giving the goats a haircut through cooking dinner, so nothing extra on that night!