Ratatouille

I like to be healthy (well, as healthy as I can be), and diet is a big part of that. Fresh food, lovingly prepared, and all that.

I also love gadgets. I’ve had my eye on a bento-style lunch box for a while. It’s a box with little compartments for salad, dessert/fruit, sandwich or main dish, etc., just like Elnora’s lunch box in A Girl of the Limberlost. I don’t want to buy a fancy lunch box if I’m just going to slide back into grabbing a protein bar or going to the cafeteria for a salad, thereby clogging up my cupboards with an unused gadget. So, I need to start getting lunch ready more than five minutes before I have to leave for work.

I’m sick of protein bars and shakes, and sick of the available salads at the cafeteria at work as well as the cool tuna-and-romaine salad with olive oil, garlic, and lemon dressing that I eat quite often. Plus, it’s the Bleak Midwinter, people! I want something hot.

Time to go on a cooking spree.

Mr. Plain is a junk food junkie, and he’s home during the day and I work, and our kids are adults, so there’s not much reason for me to cook. But. Spurred on by the specter of ratatouille and roast chicken, I went into cooking overdrive.

I peeled and cubed a couple of pears into a largish ramekin, dotted them with a tiny amount of butter and sprinkled them with raw, coarse sugar, then popped them into the toaster oven at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. Dessert for two days accomplished.

I loosened the skin on a fresh chicken, mixed butter, garlic, and thyme, and worked it under the skin along the breast and on the tops of the drumsticks. A little extra got rubbed on the outside of the skin, the legs were tied, then the whole thing was tented with foil and put into the fridge. Mr. Plain will roast it tomorrow night for dinner, because we’re having leftovers from Christmas dinner today. Roast chicken leftovers will also be good for a couple of days of lunches, as I’m the only person in the house who likes white meat.

On to the ratatouille. I started cutting my two eggplant and realized I have lost my chopping mojo when my vegetable cleaver slipped and I sliced into my hand. Ouch! Off to the first aid kit to wash, peroxide, and…find out we have run out of Band-Aids. Off to Walgreens with Mr. Plain driving and me with a paper towel wrapped around my hand. We Plains always travel in style.

At Walgreens, I hopped off to the first aid aisle while applying pressure to the paper towel fashionably wrapped around my hand. I used the “St. Elsewhere Twist,” my favorite look when bleeding profusely after clumsily slicing off part of my anatomy. I grabbed some Band-Aids, paint-on invisible bandage stuff, and butterfly closures. Then, I breezed past the cosmetics aisle because my hand had stopped bleeding (due to the magical presence of Band-Aids, no doubt—just holding them creates miracles), and also because they were having a sale, I ran out of Bare Minerals blush and one of my eye shadow colors a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t be arsed to order more, and because, well, why waste a trip?




OW!  Epic vegetable chopping FAIL.
This is post-first-aid.  And slightly out of focus.


Back home, appropriately taped together, I got back to the ratatouille. I had single-handedly (literally) put the eggplant cubes into a colander placed over a bowl, and sprinkled them liberally with kosher salt. I put off both bleeding to death and heading out for bandages because draining the eggplant is an important step, and it takes time, and…why waste time, right?

On our return home, the eggplant had drained nicely; there was about half a cup of brown juice in the bowl. I tossed this out and rinsed the eggplant to remove the salt; peeled, seeded and chopped the tomatoes, chopped the zucchini; seeded and chopped the bell pepper; chopped and caramelized the onion in olive oil. I dumped everything else in with the onions, added garlic and thyme leaves, half a can of stock and a cup of red wine, and decided to add Kalamara olives after it’s all done cooking. I used a pot that could go stovetop to oven, but decided to use the crock pot instead so I wouldn’t have to babysit the thing in the oven.



Yes, this is the world's oldest, cheapest crockpot.  Why do you ask?

So, here is a photo of the not-quite-finished product.  I'll freeze some and take the rest to work this week.  Mr. Plain doesn't like eggplant, my daughter is off visiting friends, and stepson has not had anything green since a few weeks after his birth, so this stuff is mine, all mine!  After the vegetables are cooked, I'll remove the sauce and reduce it by about half to intensify the flavor.

True Grit

Note: I hope there aren’t any more spoilers here than you’d see in any critique or analysis of True Grit. The story is an old one, and, I think, familiar to many people, but I’ve tried not to include any outright spoilers.


I saw True Grit on Christmas Eve. I own the DVD of and have seen the 1969 John Wayne/Glen Campbell/Kim Darby version many times, and I've read the book. The novel and the two films are all slightly different. If you know all three, there’s an effect similar to having three family members all tell the same story. It’s the same story, but with different parts emphasized, left out, or added by each storyteller.

True Grit is one of my favorite stories. I love the story of Mattie Ross deciding to take on the role of heading up her family, and embarking on an adventure with the goal of avenging her father’s murder. She has only a rough idea of what it will take, other than the titular “grit,” but she forges ahead, anyway.

It’s easy to characterize True Grit as a coming-of-age story, or a revenge story, but it’s both, and more. Mattie does a lot of growing up, she avenges her father, and she learns that life isn’t as easy as she expects it to be. Mattie starts out (well, and ends up, too, if we’re being honest) with a lot of rules. Her Protestant fundamentalist approach to life is fenced in with puritanical rules meant to protect her from the harshness of life, at the beginning of the story, Mattie expects these rules, which have worked in her fairly sheltered life as her father’s sidekick at their ranch, to work just the same way everywhere else.

In town, after her father’s death, the rules work a little. Mattie is still around people familiar with her family’s rules because many of them share similar religious backgrounds, if not exactly the same background. She is able to intimidate people into bargaining with her, her way, and she admirably leaves town better off than she was when she arrived. Her stubbornness carries the day in terms of her ability to find and hire Rooster Cogburn. Mattie is still in a world where some of the rules apply, and where those that don’t can be overcome with sheer tenacity in many cases, but she’s beginning to see that things are a little different outside the more controlled environment of her family home.

Mattie really is in for some interesting times when the group goes into the wild, the Indian territory, in pursuit of Tom Chaney. No one in the territory, it seems, cares much about the rules around which Mattie has shaped her expectations of the world. The territory is full of outlaws, and, worse, gray areas where the rules don’t fit. She meets people like Moon, who grew up right but turned out wrong, unlike his preacher brother. She’s forced to shoot Tom Chaney, who doesn’t make it back to civilization to be served up justice by the rules. But, she makes it, almost in one piece, and her voice in the book is that of a woman, not a girl. A woman with true grit.

I think I like this story so much because I grew up much like Mattie, with my parents’ and church’s fundamentalist rules having been fed to me as a reality that works universally and unfailingly. Leaving home for the outside world was rough, and got rougher after my first husband decided to divorce his submissive wife. The wilderness is a very good metaphor for being completely cut loose from everything familiar, a person believes is safe, and everything a person has been taught about how life works.  The lessons in True Grit, as a coming-of-age story, can be applicable to anyone leaving a sheltered environment, under whatever circumstances, and facing with the outside world for the first time.

The True Grit story has now been told three different ways, but the meaning survives the different treatments.

The 1969 film, with John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, Glen Campbell as LeBoeuf, and Kim Darby as Mattie, is endearing and well-done, though it deviates from the novel. Mattie is much more cheerful than the way she is portrayed in the novel, and, of course, she doesn’t lose her arm. All three of the main players do a great job, and, of course, John Wayne won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the drunken US Marshal.

The Coen brothers' "remake" is a different take on the same story; it’s really a different film, which is why I put “remake” in quotation marks. It's a bit truer to Charles Portis' novel than the 1969 film, and a little darker, though there are a few humorous spots.  It’s got the Coen brothers’ trademark mix of dark and light humor and violence, though there is no violence that doesn't advance the story. It intersects in a few spots with the 1969 version, but is a different retelling of the story. All of the important particulars are intact, including the bittersweet ending of the novel rather than the happier ending of the 1969 film. The “rat writ” scene, which I liked, from the 1969 version is gone, but there is a funny, impromptu marksmanship contest that is pretty funny.

Jeff Bridges does a great job as Rooster Cogburn. I didn't see him channeling The Dude, as several people have complained; in fact, his performance was a little more reminiscent of his role as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, probably because of the alcoholism both characters share. Matt Damon also did a great job as LeBoeuf, and the actress playing Mattie Ross was spectacular. In many ways, though I love Kim Darby's performance in the 1969 version, Hailee Steinfeld's portrayal was truer to the puritanical, and more importantly, gritty Mattie of the novel. I was completely prepared to dislike her, but couldn't. There definitely is portrayed, and portrayed well, the growing loss of innocence as Mattie is exposed to life outside of the Ross family ranch. She begins the movie as a young girl with grit and innocence, and ends up a young woman with grit and life experience.

Josh Brolin's portayal of Tom Chaney was brilliant. I liked it much better than the way the character was portrayed in the 1969 version. He plays Chaney in a way that is as slow, dark, and latently malevolent as poisoned molasses. Brolin’s Chaney is creepy enough that one wonders how Frank Ross could have hired him in the first place, but it still seems reasonable, given Mattie’s expectations that people conform to “the rules,” which she could only have gotten from her parents, that her father might have overridden his reservations and hired Chaney anyway.

The 2010 True Grit is an entity in its own right, and a good one. It's an honest effort that deserves to be considered on its own merits. I plan to buy the DVD when it comes out, and I'll probably watch both versions equally and love them both.