Leftover ratatouille

Mr Neff and Muffin have a wonderful bond. They especially enjoy talking to each other after supper. That has little to do with tonight's post, apart from the fact that every meal is better when shared with friends. Muffin really wishes we'd share the ratatouille.

So what do you do with one serving of four-day-old ratatouille (once you've explained to Muffin that she can't have it)? Well, you look in the refrigerator to see what it might go with--and what might need to be eaten before we go out of town and the housesitter comes. I don't want to gross out the housesitter, who is a good friend.

Yesterday I noticed green bell peppers on sale for $1, so I bought one. And last night I noticed half an onion that seems to have taken up permanent residence in the lower crisper. It is obviously an effective crisper, because the onion was in good shape. I also noticed a half-empty can of chipotle chilis in adobo sauce left over from when I made black bean stew.

So I began cooking the way I nearly always do, by pouring a little olive oil in a frying pan. I chopped the onion and added it, then did the same with the pepper along with a little bit of the adobo sauce. After four or five minutes, I dumped in the leftover ratatouille.

Meanwhile I warmed up two frozen cheese tamales (from Trader Joe's) in the microwave, and then warmed up a small amount of frozen corn with a smidgen of butter.

I arranged the ratatouille-onion-pepper concoction on half of each plate, snuggled a tamale up to each vegetable pile, and arranged corn on the other side of the tamale. And that, plus a bite of dark chocolate with hazelnuts (from Aldi), was lunch.

This morning I threw a pile of stuff (onions, dry lentils, carrots, sweet potato, celery, canned tomatoes, chipotle in adobo sauce, and, eventually, some diced turkey sausage) into the slow cooker, and for supper we had lentil soup with whole wheat bread. Tomorrow's lunch will be similar. Perhaps identical.

And now, back to editing. I really want to finish my current project before we go. Leftovers help.

Ratatouille

Ratatouille ... I'd never heard of it until I married a foodie's son and he insisted I learn to make it. Back then my motto was, if it takes longer than five minutes, we don't eat it. I thought ratatouille was extremely time consuming.

Then, nearly 40 years later, it became a movie about a rat and everyone learned how to pronounce it [ʁatatuj]. Nowadays I consider ratatouille to be the fourth-most important food, after bread, wine, and cheese. And I can make it in not much more than five minutes.

OK, maybe fifteen minutes. But then--assuming you already have the bread, wine, and cheese--your meal is ready. And if your family is small, you can eat ratatouille leftovers for days. Just don't follow most of the recipes you'll find online. They are too complicated.

Here's what you do, in two versions for two kinds of cooks.

For both versions, buy one eggplant, two zucchini, one big round onion, and some tomatoes--3 or 4 medium, 5 or 6 plum tomatoes, or even a handful of cherry tomatoes. I'm assuming you have extra-virgin olive oil and a head of garlic already.

Short version
Cut everything into bite-sized chunks, adding it to the pan as soon as it's ready and cooking as you go. Here's the order to add: olive oil, onion, eggplant, zucchini, garlic, tomato, seasonings. That's all you really need to know.

Long version
Get out a nice big heavy frying pan. Pour olive oil into it. Heat it up.

Chop up the onion. Dice it, slice it, do whatever you feel like doing to it. Put it in the pan and let it soften (not brown--turn down the heat if it tries) while you...

Peel and then dice the eggplant. Chunks should be between 1/2 and 1 inch square. Toss the eggplant into the pan with the onion and let it cook, even brown a little (you may feel like adding more olive oil; eggplant drinks the stuff), while you ...

Chop the zucchini. No need to peel. If they're small, just slice them fairly thick. If they're bigger, cut them in half lengthwise before slicing. If they're truly huge, use only one of them and cut them in quarters. Toss them into the pan with the onion and eggplant and let them cook while you ...

Dice some garlic, as much as you like, and toss it into the pan with the onion and eggplant and zucchini and let it cook while you ...

Chop the tomatoes. I don't generally remove the seeds; they don't get in the way and probably are good for us. Then dump the tomatoes in the pan with the onion and eggplant and zucchini and garlic and let it all simmer until you get the table set and the bread sliced and the wine poured.

If you like, you can add dried or fresh herbs after the tomatoes: parsley, basil, oregano are all good.

What to do with it once you've made it

• Whatever else you do with it, top it with shredded or shaved fresh Parmesan cheese (never the powdery stuff that comes in a green tube, however).
• Serve it as a soup or stew, with fat slices of good bread.
• Use it as pasta sauce. It's great on spaghetti or in lasagna.
• Brown some chicken breasts and then braise them in ratatouille.
• Smash it up a bit and spread it on bread rounds. Garnish with sprigs of parsley.
• Top a baked potato with ratatouille and cheese.
• Use it as a side dish with meat and potatoes.
• Serve it cold, on greens, perhaps with chopped boiled eggs.
• Stuff an omelet with it.
• Get creative.
  

This week we've had it on spaghetti (twice: I've been busy). And today we'll be having ratatouille omelets. If I ever finish my current work project, I might cook something else...

By the way, the Lenten Experiment is having a good effect on Mr Neff's lunch habits. He managed to eat in a restaurant with a friend at noon today for only $2.25.

Dissolution

This morning I finished reading Dissolution,and author C.J. Sansom is now high in my pantheon of mystery writers. You suspect a book is going to be good when it's blurbed by P.D. James and Colin Dexter--and this is only Sansom's debut novel.

The strongly characterized, intricately plotted, fast-paced story is set in 1537, the year England's Henry VIII moved against the larger monasteries. The king's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, sends hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake to investigate a murder at the Monastery of St. Donatus in the fictional Scarnsea. Shardlake's mission is not only to discover who killed the previous royal emissary, but also to unearth other unsavory goings-on that could justify closing the monastery.

He unearths plenty, and on both sides of the church-state conflict.

No doubt one reason I like this book is because its cynicism is general--Catholics and Reformers are equally corrupt. I like the flawed but decent protagonist who makes serious mistakes but retains his essential honesty. I like the author's knowledge of and attention to historical detail (he has a PhD in history and has practiced law). I like Sansom's skillful, unobtrusive writing style. Mostly, I enjoyed the story.

Fans of Candace Robb's Owen Archer or Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse (or Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael or Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma) are bound to enjoy Sansom's Matthew Shardlake, even if he lives in the decades that finished off the Middle Ages. The cast of characters still includes a king and councillors, an abbot, a prior, and dozens of monastics. The setting still features monasteries, serving girls, horses, and of course rumors of war between England and France.

Sansom's second book in this series, Dark Fire, won the 2005 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, and he has added two more titles to the series since then. According to a November 2007 article in The Guardian, the BBC plans a TV adaptation of Dissolution starring Kenneth Branagh.

The cook's personality type--what's yours?

My mother, who liked to entertain and was known as a good cook, never succeeded in teaching me her craft. Heaven knows she tried.

When I was 14 she was working Mondays through Wednesdays, and she asked me to prepare supper those evenings. The day before, she would write out a menu, assemble the recipes or write out instructions, gather the ingredients, show me what pans to use...

I hated it.

Even so, I thought I did a pretty good job. She, however, loved to tell her friends about the time I put cinnamon in the beans. You just don't put cinnamon in beans, even if the combination is delicious.

When I was 15, my mother decided it was safer to eat dinner three nights a week in the cafeteria at the college where she worked. The food was terrible, but predictable.

Over the years, I taught myself to cook. My food was not like my mother's, but she enjoyed eating it. She couldn't help herself, though--every time she had dinner with us, she would shake her head in amazement and say, "I never thought you'd be able to cook a meal like this!"

I thought of my mother when I took the cooking personality quiz in yesterday's New York Times. No question: she was 'methodical' and I'm 'innovative.' 'Healthy' would be our area of agreement--good nutrition is an important aspect of cooking, but never at the expense of good flavor. Ripe blackberries, good; wheat germ in mashed potatoes, bad.

Tara Parker-Pope's article accompanying the food quiz, "Who's Cooking? (For Health, It Matters)", sheds further light on the five cooking personalities she identifies.

If you'd like to see how your Myers-Briggs (MBTI) type affects your cooking style, there's no better explanation than Bonnie L. Marsh's legendary pumpkin soup recipe. You will surely recognize your style in one of her four alternate sets of directions.

The Atlantic Food Channel

Online magazine alert: The Atlantic opened their Food Channel on Friday the 13th, and it's stunning. Beware, foodie friends: if you're having trouble reclaiming your day from Facebook, don't even think of going to the food channel. You could be trapped there for hours, and this is only their third workday.

Senior editor Corby Kummer (author of The Joy of Coffee and The Pleasures of Slow Food) describes his new venture: "It's about food, but like everything else in The Atlantic, it's about much more than that: politics, business, literature, the environment -- most of all, pleasure."

I'll drink to that. And cheers to Ted Olsen for sending me the link!

Saint Patrick de l'Irlande

Tomorrow we are going to a St. Patrick's Day dinner of French and Italian food.

This makes perfect sense: tradition has it that the saint's grandmother was from la Touraine, the region made famous a millennium later by its chateaux; that Patrick studied for several years on a Mediterranean island near present-day Cannes; that he assisted the bishop of Auxerre in what would become Burgundy wine country; and that he once visited the Tuscan Pope Leo the Great in Rome (though it's possible that some of these legends confuse Patrick with Palladius, a Gaulois who also became a bishop in Ireland in the fifth century).

In honor of l'évangélisateur gaulois de l'Irlande, I am bringing two loaves of home-baked French bread to our fête patricienne. I recommend Mark Bittman's recipe, which I won't post because you really need to go out and buy his book tomorrow, or you could click on the link below and just do it.

But first, enjoy this article from the Telegraph: "French Still Like Their Daily Bread Fresh."


Oh yes, I almost forgot. Would you believe we had leftovers again tonight? The cabbage/beet/orange salad. The black bean stew, this time with some turkey sausage added to the rest of the emoluments. And the Brussels sprouts. Everything is now used up. Let the St. Patrick's Day feast begin!

Dailyness avoidance

Beware the ides of March.

Forget the Lenten Experiment--my major penitential act has been editing a manuscript that is taking much longer than I had anticipated. I thought I'd finish it last week, but now I'm wondering if I can get it done before next Sunday. The more I edit, the grumpier I get (cf. yesterday's post). Mr Neff has been marvelously patient. Right now, he's loading the dishwasher.

(Digression: for lunch we had a salad made of finely grated cabbage dressed in olive oil, lime juice, and a little salt and sugar; each pile topped with half a baked beet, sliced, and half a sliced orange; garnished with a dollop of thick Arab yogurt and a sprinkling of pecan bits. We also each had half a chicken breast, browned and then braised with half a cabbage, coarsely chopped, and some chopped onion and garlic, a splash of orange juice, and a shake of ground ginger. For supper we had leftover black bean stew, just like last night's, with a jalapeno corn muffin given to us by a neighbor we ran into while walking our dogs this afternoon. We also had Monastrell wine left over from my lunch with Ginger on Friday.)

Well, I was thinking about why the editing was putting me in such a foul mood. Do I really hate editing? Sometimes. Am I really miserable as I slog through this manuscript? No. Why, then, am I so grumpy? I think it's the dailyness of it--the "same damn thing over and over" aspect of editing a long manuscript.

I've never been good with dailyness. I wrote two books of daily devotions for Loyola Press just to see if I could discipline myself to do it--365 reflections times two, dailyness on steroids. I thought if I passed that hurdle, my dailyness-avoidance would be solved.

Apparently not.

One foot up and one foot down, That's the way to London town.

Hey, maybe I'll quit editing and fly to London. The dollar is holding up quite well against the British pound ...