Briami: Roasted Vegetable Casserole

This is really delicious Greek dish I ate when I was babysitting the other day. I loved it so much I left the house of the family I was babysitting for and went right to the grocery store to buy the ingredients to make my own. There were a myriad of recipes for briami online, but none of them seemed close to what I had just eaten, so I kind of made up my own version, adding the tofu for extra bulk and protein. You can easily omit the tofu if tofu is not your thing.

Briami
hands on time: as long as it takes you to chop a bunch of vegetables
total time: about an hour and a half

2 zucchini
1 small eggplant
2 small potatoes
2-6 tomatoes, depending on size (I had small ones and ended up using like 5)
1 block (package) of extra firm tofu
italian seasoning
olive oil
breadcrumbs

1. Preheat oven to 350, grease baking dish.
2. Slice the tofu into bite-sized blocks. I marinated it in some Italian dressing for a little bit (30 minutes?), but I think salt and pepper would be fine as well.

3. Slice all of the vegetables very thinly lengthwise (see pictures).
4. Layer vegetables and tofu in oblong glass baking dish; the order you layer them in is up to you, but I went with eggplant, zucchini, potato, tofu, eggplant, tomato. I think it would work well to distribute the tofu throughout the layers, as well.

5. Be sure to generously drizzle olive oil over each layer. I also used a sprinkling of Italian seasoning (basil, oregano, red pepper flakes, etc) over the layers.

check out the tofu peeking out from under the eggplant

6. Bake for 30 min at 350.
7. Take the briami out of the oven and liberally sprinkle bread crumbs on it, until vegetables are covered.

8. Bake for another 30-45 minutes. The idea is to really roast the hell out of this, so that the vegetable layers kind of melt and collapse into one another.

I am an incredibly lazy chopper/slicer of vegetables, so this probably would have turned out better had I spent a bit more time making the layers even and thin. I ended up slicing too much eggplant and that's why there are two eggplant layers, something I don't recommend. I do, however, recommend having  two tomato layers, so you may have to amend this recipe to include even more tomatoes.

This was a bit dry right out of the oven, but the flavors really begin to meld and develop over time, i.e. overnight. It keeps really well in the fridge and is perfect to heat up for a hearty winter lunch. I ate it for dinner sprinkled with parmesan and then for lunch the next day sprinkled with feta.