Candy Garlic and Salt-Roasted Zucchini With Deep-Fried Onions: Tiau

What the heck is a tiau? Nobody seems to know. I googled and googled, and then gave up and asked people, and still I have no satisfactory response. Chefs are always coming up with elaborate names for dishes, but I'm sure this one has a history. It's from Josée di Stasio's "A la di Stasio" cookbook, and this woman is neither careless not snooty. I think it may be related to the pattern created by stacking the vegetables, or it may just be "stacked vegetables" and have nothing to do with the pattern. Does that mean it's a big structure? A leaning tower of vegetables?

7 ingredients and some are optional:

Zucchini (mandatory if you're me)
Tomatoes (optional...unless you're Italian, I suppose)
Garlic (the best part of the dish, but in theory you could do without)
Onions (the guilty pleasure of the dish, but you could go without)
Olive oil (no where near optional)
Salt (you'll hate yourself for skipping this)
Herbes de Provence (I'm fresh out, so any fresh or dried herb works fine. I used oregano, but more traditional would be basil, parsley, thyme or sage, I suppose)

Oh, I lied. Add some fresh black pepper (it's optional, too, but it's a nice addition)

This is the ultimate gourmet but simple side dish (aka "Italian"). You get all your vegetables, but you load it up with a ton of olive oil. The garlic turns into crunchy candy, the onions into melting savouriness, and the zucchini into meaty, flavourful slices of my own personal heaven.

 The first time I made this I only had one small tomato, so I diced it up and scattered it on top of the stacked zucchini, but the next time I did it properly and sliced the tomatoes thick. The dish looked better, but the tomatoes were too juicy and acidic, and a little bitter, and made the meal disappointing. So I promote the diced tomato method or none at all. If you wait for an hour to cook something, and your anticipation and expectations build, it's no fun getting to the finish line only to discover that you get a flimsy certificate for the win, not a trophy, not even a small medal or goody bag - just acidic tomatoes.

Preheat the oven to 400 Fahrenheit. Slice a bunch of tomatoes (maybe), zucchini and (significantly less) onion into 3/8-inch slices (a little thinner is better because they'll cook a little fast, and if at the end of the hour you're getting a little antsy to eat, you can probably pull the dish out a little early. An hour's an awfully long time sometimes).

Mince the garlic. Don't chop. Normally I just finely chop when it says mince. My garlic press is junk. It does odd things to the garlic and kind of makes it seem like spaghetti squash the way the tendrils have a strange texture. In this case, you need to mince. The garlic needs to be that thin to roast properly and become delicious bundles instead of bitter pieces (for those who don't know, a mince is just a very, very, very, very fine chop, and home chefs generally use a garlic press to achieve it).

Take a large baking dish (or two if you love leftovers like me - makes great roasted vegetable sandwiches the next day) and line the bottom with the onions, half the garlic, a sprinkle of good salt, your herb of choice, and some grinds of fresh pepper. Then pour over about 2-3 tbsp of olive oil. I've never actually measured this. You just want a fair bit. This is Italian, after all, so add lots. Make the dish correctly the first time, and then play with amounts the next.

Then stack the tomatoes and zucchini (green zucchini and yellow if you can find them, just to make the dish look pretty) in a way that looks artistic on top of the onions. Sprinkle with the remaining minced garlic, some more (a generous amount) of salt, some more of your herb, some grinds of black pepper, and another 2-3 tbsp of olive oil. Do make this recipe with less oil you could put all the vegetables in a large bowl and add a few tablespoons of the oil. Then mix it in with your hands, and THEN place the onions and garlic in the baking dish, and top with the stacked tomatoes and zucchini.

My garlic clumped together because minced garlic doesn't really like to sprinkle...this was amazing. I don't think I'd pre-toss the vegetables just for this reason. The garlic needs the oil to roast well and mellow out, but if you toss it with the other vegetables it would spread out properly and not turn into clusters.

Don't over-bake this. Stick it in the oven for 1 hour. It may need a bit more time if your vegetables are thick, but probably not. With the tomatoes in it, there's not a big chance of the dish drying out and things getting stuck to the bottom, but even if you don't use a lot of tomatoes, like I did the first time, there should be enough oil and liquid from the zucchini to create a pool on the bottom. THAT's why the onions are so incredible. They've sat at the bottom the whole roasting time and soaked it all in. So when you serve the dish there should be puddles of oil and onion and the latter is undeniably delicious. It's basically become onion confit, but without the sugar that's usually associated with it. Olive oil deep-fried onions...

Deep-fried garlic is not as exciting, and neither was the tomato, but my lovely salted zucchini....I think I ate a whole dish of these, and was very thirsty afterward. Once, I burnt the dish a little and the onions on the bottom charred! It was kind of like onion chips, though. It will probably give me cancer, but it also gave me so much joy. Toss up?