Baked Penne with Corn, Zucchini, and Basil

The temperatures are dropping, which means we're slowly adding more Italian food to our weekly repertoire. While searching for a not-so-heavy baked dish, we happened upon a recipe for Baked Penne with Corn, Zucchini, and Basil in Williams-Sonoma's online recipes. We have yet to meet a vegetable we didn't like, so we decided to prepare it for an impromptu dinner for 5.

The ingredient line-up is a little more extensive than usual, with 4 veggies plus a punch of garlic and basil. The recipe also calls for fresh oregano, but our grocer was sadly out of stock! We opted instead to use 1/2 teaspoon of the dried variety to maintain the Mediterranean flavor.

The prep time for this recipe is extensive, gang. Each of those vegetables requires chopping, and the basil and garlic must be sliced. Then, you'll spend 25 minutes or so on sauteeing the three rounds of vegetable/spice combinations. It's not the kind of task you have to pay attention to, which allowed us to catch up with our guests as we worked.

We opted to use a large casserole dish to bake the finished product, rather than putting the pan directly into the oven as the recipe instructs. This also saved us some clean-up, because we were able to transfer every saute product from the pan into the casserole without dirtying any intermediate bowls.

Our final, assembled product took just 20 minutes to bake, and the result was a light, cheesy bowl of delicious. It also drew a lot of compliments from our guests, and really, what better reward for 60 minutes of low-intensity work?

To make this dish a little less impactful on the waistline, next time we'll sautee the vegetables with cooking spray, or at least halve the recommended 3 tablespoons of oil. Other alternatives include using less or low-fat cheese and using water or vegetable broth in place of white wine.

Eggplant, Zucchini, and Tomato Tian

Generally, when we try a recipe and then go find the link to share it with you guys, we end up seeing reviews on the recipe site that are very similar to ours. This time, though, we've stumbled upon something that we didn't necessarily love but that's had a positive public response. So we'll let you be the judge...

Today's recipe is Eggplant, Zucchini, and Tomato Tian (Cooking Light, June 2010). Part of our problem might be that we didn't realize this was intended to be a side dish! The issue itself didn't specify explicitly, but now that we see it on the web, we've realized our error.

This has all the makings of a delicious vegetarian dish: hearty vegetables, fine cheeses, savory breadcrumbs. (We substituted vegetable broth for chicken broth to make it completely veggie.) And it was easy enough to assemble, requiring 15 minutes of prep time to roast the vegetables and 1 hour of cooking time for the completed dish. We just found it to be seriously lacking in flavor.

We did use fresh oregano and thyme, but we think more seasoning would've provided us with some richer flavor. And maybe, as a side dish, the recipe plays better not taking center stage, but standing alone it was pretty lackluster.

The dish may also have benefited from the inclusion of more (and more melt-able!) cheese. For example, a shredded mozzarella layered over the vegetables may have brought the dish together a little better than the drier texture of the Parmesiano-Reggiano. Maybe even the incorporation of a little bit of tomato past to bring out richer flavors would help.

So we leave you with a challenge: Try this recipe and see what you think, either as a side or a main dish, making our recommended substitutions or finding your own. Then let us know what you think in the comments!