OTTUMWA — Student chef Mangal Tamang didn’t learn Italian cooking in his native country of Nepal. For that, he had to come to Ottumwa, Iowa.

The native of the small Himalayan kingdom has had a lot of jobs: tour guide, mountain climbing porter (a “sherpa”) and cook. It was cooking that caught his attention.

“He’s a very hard worker,” said Chef Gordon Rader, department head for the Culinary Arts program at Indian Hills Community College, where Tamang is a student. “The other students are learning a lot from him.”

Today, it was Tamang who was learning: Asked for a summer recipe Ottumwa Courier readers could reproduce, Rader said he’d have his student go through the steps so readers could follow along.

“These are light, very nice dishes,” the student said as he worked. “This smells so good.”

He had begun sautéing the olive oil and garlic for the chef’s ratatouille, though Tamang warned, “Don’t let it get brown.”

“That’s right,” the chef echoed, “browned garlic [can be] bitter.”

He then taught Tamang the trick of removing the skins from tomatoes, which were being readied for a simple sauce to go over crisp fried eggplant slices.

“Turn them [upside-down] and [gently cut] an ‘x’ into the bottom,” Rader told him.

He then had him drop the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute or two, then plunge them into cold ice water. Tamang was able to slip the skin off each tomato.

Rader said he loved being able to share such tips, both with students and with the public. Even the two recipes — an Italian-style eggplant parmesan and a French inspired vegetable stew — were a sort of tip on how to use some of the abundant zucchini, eggplant and tomatoes coming out of Southeast Iowa gardens this summer.

Both dishes finished around the same time, with the eggplant crisp, the sauce tasting like fresh tomatoes instead of sugar, and the vegetable stew being tender but not mushy,

“This is very good,” said Tamang, as he tried each dish. “Excellent.”

Chef Rader agreed.

“These would be great for any kind of meal,” he said.