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If you want to make it easier on yourself, then just use pesto, rather than making your own basil sauce.
Serves: 8
Ingredients
- 2 pcs large aubergines
- 2 pcs zucchinis or 4 smaller ones in different colours
- 3 pcs large tomatoes
Sauce
- 5 dl vegan cream
- 3 dl raw cashew nuts, soaked
- 1 pcs veggie stock cube
- 1 pinch of nutmeg
- black pepper
Sauce – instructions
- Soak cashew nuts overnight
- Rinse the cashew nuts.
- Blend garlic and basil in a food processor.
- Add cashews and process. Add lemon and a little olive oil. Work into a paste. You need to start and stop to scrape down the contents on the food processor wall, several times. To get a paste takes about 15-20 minutes.
- Ideally, let the paste stand overnight.
- Add half the non-dairy cream to a pot, add the basil & cashew paste, and blend with the cream. Add the rest of the cream and ensure the sauce is really smooth and evenly blended.
- Add the veggie stock cube by crumbling it over the sauce.
- Let simmer together on very low heat.
- Taste with additional lemon juice and salt if preferred.
Gratin – Instructions
- Slice zucchini, aubergine and tomatoes thinly lengthwise in 5 mm slices if possible
- Oil a deep oven dish, I used a 28 cm x 18 cm large dish.
- Place a layer of one vegetable in the bottom. Pour some sauce in the middle, and spread it out with a spoon. The sauce should be a very thin layer on top of each vegetable layer. Don’t add too much. Then add another vegetable layer and then add sauce, continue layer veggies and sauce until you have your final top layer.
- Then add a thick layer of sauce on the top.
- Place the dish in a preheated oven, and bake at 200 C for 40 – 60 minutes. Check halfway and cover with tinfoil so as not to burn the top layer. Don’t seal the top of the oven dish, place the tin foil in such a way that the steam from the veggies can escape and evaporate.
- The gratin is done when it has a golden brown top layer, the aubergine and zucchinis are tender and the majority of the fluid from the vegetables has cooked away.
Notes
- I use only one vegetable for each layer.
- If a fan-assisted oven, let steam out every now and then.
- Ensure you use more aubergine than zucchini, otherwise, the gratin will become watery.
2 comments
this looks great! I have eggplant and zucchini from my garden but I have a couple of questions.
What do you mean with vegan cream? And what measurement is ‘dl’? I’m originally from Germany, now living in the States but I haven’t seen this in either country. Thx!
Hi Claudia, Thank you for your kind comment and questions! (Due to a high amount of SPAM I didn’t see this until now, I made a separate post about this and how my site was targeted by spammers) anyway I want to answer this as your questions are great and I also want to answer it albeit so late, since all comments mean a lot to me <3
1. Vegan cream - now days you can buy an assortment of vegan creams, as in plant based creams to use instead of diary cream when you cook. Your local super market probably has a variety to choose from. The most common one is soy cream, but if you get the opportunity, try the oat cream as it's great for cooking gratin's!
2. Measurements - dl is deciliter and commonly used in Europe. I'm not sure what you use in Germany? Google has a great conversion tool here you can use: https://www.google.se/search?q=dl+to+cup+conversion&oq=dl+to+cup+&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j6j0l2.4396j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Let me know if you ever made this recipe and what you think. Perhaps you made some tweaks to it? if so I’d love to hear about how you made this recipe :)
Best Wishes
Veronica