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.