Ratatouille

I've been cooking a lot lately, but even so I found some tomatoes, zucchinis, and eggplants threatening to get mushy at the bottom of my vegetable drawer. Luckily there's a way to use up all those things in one go, and at the same time pay homage to my favorite movie.

For real. My favorite movie EVER. So much Pixar love!

Now that I've told everyone that my favorite movie involves a little blue animated rat, maybe we should move beyond my classy, intelligent, and highly refined movie tastes and get back to the food.

Ratatouille is always a colorful dish, but when you're using heirloom eggplants and tomatoes and green and yellow squashes, all from the farmer's market (although not entirely fresh, due to the aforementioned time at the bottom of the vegetable drawer) it's particularly beautiful. 

So there's a lot of photographs in this post. 

Everything should be in approximately bite-sized pieces. You can make ratatouille on the grill or in the oven as well, but I usually sauté everything, mostly because I'm lazy.

Always start with onions. Then add the eggplant. When it's looking pretty well cooked, throw in the squash.

It's good to add some fresh herbs somewhere in there - I was feeling REALLY lazy, and just tossed in some garlic. But thyme or basil or marjoram or any number of things always makes a good addition, particularly if your ingredients aren't at their peak. This is a good recipe to use for slightly inferior produce, although luckily I didn't have that problem.

The tomatoes go in last. I just stirred them in and made sure they were incorporated, then turned off the heat. They don't need to get overly mushy or disappear into the mixture - they hold more flavor (and color!) if they're just barely cooked. 

My real stroke of genius was plating the ratatouille onto some goat cheese covered toast (Purple Haze and pain au levain, both from the Metropolitan Bakery). The sharp goat cheese was the perfect compliment to the sweet, tomato-y ratatouille (although, is there anything NOT made better by goat cheese?) and the toast added a lovely crunchy texture. Delicious.

Technically a "vegetable dish" despite the three different types of cheese.

I just want you to know that I'm extra glad you're coming on Saturday-- there is going to be so much food!

Yay! Speaking of which, what food should I bring?

Maybe something veggie-ish? We have a grill at our disposal.

Does this count as vegetable-ish, or is there too much cheese?

oh shit man! I wanted to make that recipe so bad- I would totally freak if you brought that! (read: a resounding :yes, please bring it"!!)

It's such a relief that all my closest friends love food (although probably not coincidental), and because we're all intelligent, well-read, twenty-something, lady foodies, we all read the same blogs. Or at least Smitten Kitchen. And so when there's a new blog post up, suddenly all conversations begin to revolve around the latest recipe and everyone gets a craving. Which is quite convenient; for instance, when you've been craving chocolate doughnuts all day because of SK's latest recipe, and you show up at your friend's apartment and discover that she's been spending the whole day making those very doughnuts, well, life is good. 

And when that same friend is hosting a birthday/house-warming/what-have-you and you want to bring a dish, well, then the conversation at the top of this post occurs. And suddenly cheese counts as a vegetable, at least at our tables. 

I followed SK's recipe for the zucchini and ricotta galette pretty closely, although I think mine had a bit more zucchini in it. The dough is a regular pie dough (butter!) with some sour cream and lemon added in to give it some richness. Very delicate, very delicious.

My favorite part was letting the zucchini sweat, which always looks sort of amazing. And yes, it's slightly embarrassing to admit that I spent several minutes watching water coming out of zucchini slices, but I'm still going to show you one of the dozens of photos I took.