The Dish: Top Chef Jennifer Carroll's end-of-summer veggie tian; Couture Cuisine dinner series
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- The end-of-summer veggies are still giving us their glory, and Top Chef All-Star Jennifer Carroll has a delicious use them in this week's The Dish.
Chef Jen brought us into her Fishtown home to teach us how to make a colorful, artistic dish called a tian. It's a meal that is shockingly easy to pull off and will easily impress any guest.
"The garden is exploding right now, don't let it go to waste," Carroll says.
She's using that bounty to make the tian.
"The dish is named after the tian itself, a casserole dish," she says.
It looks fancy, but it is super easy to make. The only trick is finding veggies that are roughly the same size, in order to create a symmetrical stack.
She starts by draining out some of the moisture from the eggplant.
"We want to do the eggplant first," she says, because this process takes about 15 minutes. "Get a little bit of salt. We want the water to come out and start dehydrating it, pulling out the excess out of it."
Chef Jen chose a Chinese eggplant, which is smaller and stacks well with her squash, zucchini and tomatoes.
"I try and get the same size for each, like poker chip rounds," she says.
Once you slice them all up, toss them with extra virgin olive oil and a pinch of salt. Now, it's time to stack. And there is an art to it.
"We're going to literally try and get the same size of each vegetable going in order," she says, "the same order that we put them down."
Our stacks look like this: Squash, zucchini, tomato, eggplant, squash, zucchini, tomato and eggplant. Eight pieces all in one standing line.
To the tian dish itself, Chef Jen adds a layer of a red pepper based romesco sauce. Her garlicky charred pepper puree is homemade, but you can use store bought.
Now, it's time to lay down the stacks. You work from the outside in, pack it tightly and save the smaller stacks for the spiral in the middle. Those pieces are the pillar and hold it all together.
Add a little more extra virgin olive oil and salt to the top and then pop it in the oven at 425 degrees for one hour.
Once it's done, garnish the tian with some fresh herbs. Chef Jen uses chives, basil and parsley.
For the fall haul, try root veggies like sweet potatoes, pumpkins, onions, carrots or parsnips.
If you want to try her full tian and romesco sauce recipes for yourself at home, CLICK HERE.
Chef Jen hosts unique food experiences
RELATED: Sisterly Love Collective hosts 'Cookbooks & Convos'
Over the past few decades, the Northeast Philadelphia native has become a major player in our city's food scene, and now, she's taking a more intimate approach.
Chef Jen is now opening up her own home for unique food experiences.
"We do anything that you want that revolves around food," she says. "If you're hungry, and you need a chef, call Chef Jen Carroll, everybody!"
She calls it Carroll Couture Cuisine, the latest venture with her longtime partner Billy Riddle.
"I am doing a dinner series here in the studio where it's ten people max and you come and you have dinner. It's typically five courses. It's a menu that I make based on a past place that I worked," she says.
The studio is their actual home, a historic loft in Fishtown.
"You sit down, you bring whatever you want to drink, Billy and I cook, we interact, we have fun," she says. "You can walk around, take pictures, act like you're in your own home."
The couple also created a Spice of the Month Club.
"We do a different new spice every single month, that we mail out to all the members," she says. "We've done really cool ones, like we just did an Everything Spice with ramps in it. We did a Ramp Ranch Spice. We did a Berbere spice. There are so many different, fun spices that we've created."
Chef Jen is also one of the co-founders of the Sisterly Love Collective of Philly-based female chefs and makers. Right now, they're hosting a huge monthlong series called "Cookbooks & Convos."
"We're flying in women authors from all over the country to do either dinners with a another woman-owned restaurant that is a part of Sisterly Love, a demo, a panel, book signings," she explains. "Seriously, you're all going to be well read and well fed by the end of this series."
Click here for details on Cookbooks & Convos from the Sisterly Love Collective, CLICK HERE.
