There's a fine line

Between ratatouille and rancid vegetable mush. Apparently that line is quickly crossed when you leave the ratatouille in a pot on the stove for two days.

Blech.

Ratatouille, for you goggle-eyed, peasant-class, boob tube monkeys who only know it as the name of a delightful children's movie, began as a French vegetable stew. It's the un-deconstructed version of the dish at the end of that same movie. To make it you stew a lot of vegetables together, sometimes after frying them, but that's sort of up to you. If ever there were a delicious French peasant repast, it's ratatouille and crusty bread with butter and a few bottles of table wine.

I went and bought the ingredients the other day at that bastion of fine produce, Safeway. In D.C. there are multiple Safeways. The one in Georgetown is the "Social" Safeway because I guess it's a good place to meet slutty people who cook or something. My Safeway is, I believe, sometimes referred to as the "Soviet" Safeway because of the history of crappy selection. It's not bad these days, but the produce is not going to wow you. That's okay, it's a stew. As long as the vegetables are relatively fresh and you can get some garlic and basil, you're okay.

As an aside, I'm sick and tired of D.C.'s farmers markets. Where I'm from, the Midwest, which has the distinction of being near a farm or two, farmers markets were places you would show up with money to meet farmers who showed up with vegetables still dirty from the walloping great field of earth they'd just been pulled out of. The half with too many vegetables gave them to the half with too much money in fair trade and you went home with some hideous, but cheap and delicious veggies and fruit.

I went to the Dupont farmers market and they have cedar planked salmon and overpriced, sad looking strawberries. Everything is marked organic; Everything is expensive as hell; And everything bears that slight taint of being touched by at least one earnest yuppie too many.

So, back to the Safeway where yours truly is trying to answer questions from the Latina checkout lady who has, with the same sort of instinct that draws cats to allergic people, intuited that my Spanish is exactly good enough to give her a good laugh. She opened simply enough by asking if I was a vegetariano. Porque no tuve carne (I didn't have meat). I, quixotically, tried to explain that, no, I wasn't a vegetarian, but today I was making a delicious French meal called ratatouille that didn't require meat. I may have gotten it across to her, but she did end up asking if I spoke French.

Anyway, the ratatouille was a disaster of burned garlic, missing basil and rather drab vegetables. Nevertheless, and here's one of the key selling points of this dish, it came together nicely. It wasn't great, but even bad ratatouille paired with some bread and butter gets the job done. I ate it for two days, during which time my gut inquired frequently and loudly as to what the hell I thought I was up to. It made one exercise class in particular kind of touch-and-go. Still, plenty of fiber and deliciousness even if I was producing high-grade construction-ready adobe in my spare time.

Finally, yesterday, I got a mouthful of the ratatouille that I'd been leaving on the stove (not for philosophically grounded reasons, but because I'm an orangutan) and realized that somewhere during the night my french cuisine had transubstantiated into compost.

So, here's how to make ratatouille:
- cut up a bunch of the following: 1 egg plant, 1-2 summer squash/courgettes, a couple of bell peppers, some mushrooms, 6 cloves of garlic, a handful of parsley and a handful or more of basil (expert tip: you can't really add too much basil to anything). This is a rough meal, so things don't have to be chopped up finely. Cut the eggplant, for instance, into rounds about half an inch in height and then quarter the rounds.
- Open a tin or two of tomatoes, and look, this isn't a highly engineered dish here you prancing tit, stop fretting about whether it's one tin or two. See how you like it with one and try it with two next time. That's cooking.
- (Second expert tip: put the chopped up eggplant into a bowl and either sprinkle salt on it or drop it into boiling water for about 30 seconds. This helps alleviate the bitter taste you sometimes get with eggplant).
- lightly saute the 6 or so cloves of garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil (a little butter thrown in has never hurt either, you pompous ascetic) in a very large cooking pot.
- Add some salt and pepper and drop in the mushrooms and courgettes (oh, courgettes are the English term for what you goofs call zuchini - we speak English here in the U.S. of A. so, er, love it or leave it, etc. and so forth. Also, Freedom Fries!)
- Saute until you've got a little brown on the mushrooms but before you've totally burned the garlic. Burned garlic tastes like failure in cooking, so avoid it as sedulously as possible. Expert tip 3: You will never use the word sedulously in conversation.
- Add the eggplant and whatever else I've forgotten to tell you to add so far, including the tomatoes.
- Turn the whole mess down to a medium simmer. Add chicken stock or water if it's not kind of watery and go away and have a beer or two. Check in as necessary.
- When is it done? Taste it occasionally. It's a stew so it's got the consistency of thin chilli. All the veggies are okay to eat raw, so basically you're just adding heat to mix the flavors.
- Eat with crusty bread and irresponsible amounts of butter.
- REFRIGERATE THE LEFTOVERS. I cannot stress this enough.

The final result should look EXACTLY like this:



Or you can use that computer network I've been hearing so much about.







Disclaimer: If you burn yourself on my ratatouille recipe, or learn the hard way that you're allergic to anything in it, it serves you right. I'm not your life-coach. Exercise some critical thinking when you do stuff. I take no responsibility for your dumb mistakes. Mine are trying enough.