Autumn Vegetable Melts: or, Extravagant oven use

When no one's around to complain about the smell, it's time for onions!

I know that the note above the recipe seems hilariously snooty. "If you can't get Humble bread, search out a wood-oven-baked, naturally leavened olive loaf from a local baker." But for context, this recipe was part of a feature of local food-related businesses. They used this sandwich recipe to spotlight a bakery on Prince Edward Island. You should also know that we don't have anyone running wood-fired ovens on a semi-industrial scale here, so we purchased rye bread from the supermarket.

Autumn Vegetable Melts 1 small eggplant 1 medium zucchini 1 large red bell pepper 1 large yellow bell pepper (or just use two bell peppers of the same color) 2 to 3 tbsp (30-45 mL) olive oil* 4 large, thin slices of red onion 2 unpeeled garlic cloves ½ c (⅛ liter) packed arugula, finely chopped ¼ c (6 cL) mayonnaise 4 slices rye bread† 8 oz (25 dag) sliced mozzarella, or 2 cups (5 dL) shredded mozzarella Heat oven to 450°F/230°C. Line two large baking sheets with foil.‡ Cut eggplant crosswise into ¼" (½ cm) slices. Cut the zucchini lengthwise into 8 slices, also about ¼" or ½ cm thick. Arrange eggplant, zucchini, and bell peppers on baking sheets in a single layer, spritzing both sides with cooking spray. Separate the onion slices into rings, spritz both sides with cooking also. Season everything with salt and pepper. Keep the vegetables sorted instead of mixing them on the pan. They'll be done at different times, and you'll want to easily remove some of them while leaving the rest to bake longer. Rub the garlic cloves with oil and place on one of the baking sheets. Roast vegetables for about 30 minutes, rotating the pans about halfway through the baking time. Start checking them for doneness a lot earlier than you think. Remove vegetables from the pans as they're done, and let them cool slightly. Leave the oven on. While the vegetables are baking, lightly toast the bread if desired. Squeeze the garlic cloves out their skins into a small bowl. Mash with a fork. Stir in the arugula and mayonnaise, then season with salt and pepper to taste. Set aside 8 slices of cheese (or 15 dL shredded). To assemble, spread one side of each bread slice with the arugula mayonnaise. Layer about one third of the vegetables on the bread. Add one half of the remaining cheese. Repeat these layers, ending with the vegetables. Top with the reserved cheese. Bake 5-10 minutes, or until vegetables are hot and the cheese is bubbling. If desired, broil for 1-2 minutes to brown the tops. Serve with a knife and fork. *or cold-pressed seed oil †or rye-olive bread if you want to strictly follow the original ‡The original recipe tells you to line the pans with parchment paper. Don't do this unless you like playing with fire. Source: Food and Drink, autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

I was drawn to this recipe for two reasons. One, I've been trying to add more vegetables to my daily food without being punitively healthy, and two, it looked pretty simple to make. As you can see, we don't have to spend a lot of time cutting vegetables into tiny square-shaped pieces. Heck, we don't have to tediously peel anything.

And so, with everything ready, we checked our recipe and heated the oven to a far hotter temperature than I ever feel safe using. Purely for a safety check, I decided to see how hot this oven goes. It kind of reassured me that the oven is theoretically capable of keeping itself together a hundred degrees hotter than we're about to use it. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I didn't want to burn the house down with Canadian food.

Speaking of housefires, we are instructed to heat the oven to 450° and then line the pans with paper. Anyone who stayed awake during English literature class can tell you the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites:

Ray Bradbury is literally the only reason we didn't set the oven on fire. Maybe Canadian recipe writers wouldn't recognize this impending act of culinary arson because they use Celsius over there. After all, Ray Bradbury didn't write a famous novel called Celsius 232.7.

Having put the vegetables on aluminum foil (not paper!) and started baking them, let's get to the arugula mayonnaise. This is the first time I have ever purchased arugula unless you count mixed greens.  I always thought these leaves were dandelion greens.

I remember arugula having quite a moment as the target of food ire. Arugula held the same place of food spite that quiche did in the 1980s and that soy would take in the 2010s. Arugula was alleged to be the food of sissies, of people who went to health food stores, of weirdos who wanted to ban fried chicken, and those icky icky hipsters with their bicycles and their man-buns. 

The term "fragile masculinity" hadn't entered public consciousness yet, but men who suffered from it went into passionate man-fits at the mere mention of arugula on a restaurant menu. Later on, tofu would relieve arugula of its burden as the food of people who hate mayonnaise and all that's right with America. Anyway, since we've collectively moved on from bashing arugula-eaters for destroying all that is good and deep-fried, arugula now sits unremarkably among the salad greens.

After paying for an entire box of out-of-date hipster-bait, I can tell you that... arugula tastes like diluted watercress dipped in dirt. I was not thrilled about having to find ways to eat an entire 8-ounce tub of arugula and like it. Granted, most salad greens aren't particularly delightful on their own, hence the practice of slathering them with gobs of dressing and then piling on cheese.

On top of being stuck with a half-pound of salad greens that I had just discovered I don't like, the recipe tells us to mix our arugula with mayonnaise. And I have to tell you that the slimy mayo and the bitter salad greens..... somehow taste really good together. Somehow their flavors add up beautifully. It's like spinach-and-cheese only more so. Suddenly I understand why older recipes call mayonnaise "salad dressing." I am not kidding when I say I would smear this arugula-mayo on cold sandwiches all the dang time. Next time you get a tub of mixed salad greens, fish out the arugula leaves, chop them, and mix them with salted and peppered mayo. It's that good.

In case you think I'm overstating how much I liked the arugula mayo, I later made another batch (this time I didn't bother roasting the garlic) and put it on noodles. It's like pesto, except all your Italian friends would faint.

Back to our Canadian sandwiches. Things started to smell good in only two minutes. We weren't even done snipping the arugula into tiny pieces yet, and certainly hadn't mixed in the mayonnaise. First, the kitchen smelled wonderfully like vegetables. Then the odor of pepper hid everything else. I got a huge fright when a great plume of smoke coming out of the oven vent, as if it was the chimney over a merrily burning fireplace. Then, to my great relief, I realized it was steam instead.

Sooner than expected, the garlic was ready to remove. As promised in the directions, you can just squeeze it out of the peel. The garlic had turned into a sticky paste.

I don't think this recipe was originally meant for the home. It's almost absurd to fire up the oven this hot just for two pans of vegetables. The directions make more sense if you imagine a restaurant where the cooks simply slide a pan of vegetables between the pizzas. Furthermore, baking the garlic then mashing it would be a great choice if you had a large batch of them, but feels a bit silly when it's just one person at home.

I couldn't stop being nervous about running the oven at such a high temperature. I don't know why I get nervous about setting the oven this hot for baking. After all, the oven gets a lot hotter when it cleans itself, and I have often started a cleaning cycle and then left the house all afternoon.

I expected to find the vegetables nearly done after just ten minutes, but at that point they looked like they were only beginning to cook- even though they smelled like they were already done. However, and I blame the recipe for only giving a half-sentence mention of this, the vegetables were not all fully cooked at the same time. When the bell peppers were perfect, the onions were unsalvageable. I'm sorry Canada, I guess your recipes are too complex for someone who went to school in the US. 

Nothing but greasy charcoal here!

We had to cut up another onion and bake it all by itself. Even though we didn't burn it, the onion shrank a lot.

Well, we didn't burn down the house cooking zucchini.

Don't those half-burnt vegetables look Instagram-ready? 

While we're on the subject of near-incinerated plants, I should note that if your kitchen doesn't have a ducted vent, you will live with the smell of vegetables for a few days. The smell drifted all over the house, and remained in little pockets long after the general draftiness had taken most of it away. Long after the rest of the house was odor-free, I went upstairs and found that it smelled like someone had set up a grill in the bathroom. For the next day or so, I would be doing random things and walk right into a little corner of the house that still smelled powerfully like roasted vegetables.

At this point, we were almost ready for assembly. I'll just point out that so far we have spent almost half an hour... on sandwiches. The recipe's easy enough, but I always thought you slapped together sandwiches in thirty seconds or less... and toasted them if you feel a bit fancy. 

Speaking of, we are directed to toast the bread. As if we didn't heat up the kitchen enough keeping the oven high enough to almost singe the Teflon off the pan, we now drag the countertop appliances into the war against the air conditioning. Also, between the bread factory, our toaster, and the oven after we have these sandwiches put together, we're going to end up with thrice-baked bread.

To the recipe writers' credit, we're supposed to make this in the autumn-- in Canada. I'm sure this would cozy up a kitchen very nicely instead of make one reach for a fan. Anyway, toasting the bread hardened it a lot. Should sliced bread be able to rock back and forth?

They don't call it "shit on a shingle" for nothing.

The bread wasn't the only thing roasted to a hard crisp. Some of the eggplant slices were doing a passable imitation of potato chips.

All right, it's finally time to stack our supper together! We start with our delightful tooth-threatening rye toast.

We then apply our unexpectedly-delicious arugula mayonnaise. As aforesaid, if you take nothing else from this recipe, give the arugula mayo a try. After that, we mound on the onions like a heap of spaghetti.

Oh delicious onions. I love you so.

As we stacked the vegetables on, things got precarious. I almost had to get out toothpicks.

We also had some surplus eggplant slices that we simply could not stack onto these things. I don't fault the recipe for this, since it specifies "one small eggplant" in the ingredient list before I halved everything. However, this meant we had to figure out what to do with them to prevent waste.

I ended up baking them a few nights later with spaghetti sauce and cheese on top. I only note this because eggplant Parmigiana confused everyone else in the house. "So it's a lasagna with eggplants in it? Why would you do that? We have lasagna noodles in the cabinet right there!" I got a similar response when I made 1970s-style moussaka. No one wanted to share the eggplant Parmigiana with me, even though it had cheese on top.

Moving back to the sandwiches, the oven heat took longer than I thought to penetrate them to the center. You'd think a blazing-hot oven would cook our dinner near-instantly, but we had to wait for these things to warm up.

While the centers of these vegetable mounds may have required a lot of time to get hot, the cheese shreds got crispy and browned before they had time to melt. 

The recipe says to serve this with "grilled meat or poultry on the side," and as it happens we had leftover chicken. Since this recipe comes from Canada, I put the leg and thigh on the plate in one piece as so many places in Canada do.

American chicken doesn't require so much use of a knife and fork.

It's like I'm in the beautiful north again! After this lovely feast, I just wanted to put on my babushka and my warmest coat and rent ice skates on the Rideau Canal.

Did you think I was kidding about the babushka?

I've noticed that a lot of vegetable recipes in this magazine involve baking your plant matter in a near-searing oven. And if it's chilly out, I definitely recommend it. It's hard to find a reason not to like roasted vegetables with cheese on top.

The leftovers microwaved better than I thought they would. True, the cheese wasn't so nice and crispy as it was the first time, but you could definitely make a surplus of these and put the extras away for another day.

 In conclusion, these take a lot longer than a sandwich should- but aside from having a slice of bread underneath them, they're not really sandwiches anyway. They are, however, really lovely. It turns out that baking vegetables in a superheated oven seems to make them a lot more delicious than boiling ever could. And once you add melted, crispy-golden cheese, these are far better than anyone who ever heard a grim "eat your vegetables" could ever believe. Next time it's cold out, I definitely recommend stacking vegetables on rye bread because it's delicious.