Summer on simmer: ratatouille

Part 1: Christmas recovery

Dear Melanie, we made it! Your household with covid, and mine with a many-miles-long parade of social engagements to attend and dinner parties to host… we both got through Christmas, and I was so happy to hear that yours was joyful.

Ours was a lovely day too, in the end. As we do each year, we hosted family and a few close friends for Christmas breakfast (mangoes, cherries and berries, and warm croissants fresh from the oven. Tea, coffee, and just a little glass of champagne).

Then at lunch, a new group of friends arrived for a more traditional meal: this year I roasted a turkey breast that had been wrapped over dried fruits, served up a beautiful eye fillet, cooked parsnips in nutmeg, baked crispy potatoes, pan-fried then roasted carrots (I made a sweet glaze for them from marmalade and maple syrup, then tossed in some thyme leaves and served them with chopped hazelnuts), and very briefly boiled a combination of green beans and edamame peas, which I then tossed in lime juice and salt, and sprinkled with shaved almonds. There was cranberry sauce for the turkey, a peppercorn sauce for the beef, and, as per my husband’s request, a gravy for anywhere you wanted it to go. I am sorry to say that despite the simple and tasty recipes you shared with me, I did not make the gravy myself. My two usable stovetop burners (it’s a very old stovetop and some don’t work) were already taken up with the green beans and a pudding steaming away, so to packet and microwave I turned. Shh, don’t tell.

All that cooking and eating was punctuated by a lot of present-giving, cracker-breaking, silly-hat-wearing and bad-joke-telling, as well as a rousing sing-along beside the piano (have you ever noticed just how high some Christmas carols go? Yikes!), more washing up than I care to remember, and finally, I poured myself two fingers of my own homemade Baileys Irish cream (so good!) and we all sat down together to watch one last Christmas movie before bed.

It wasn’t half bad for a Christmas Day, and had the added bonus of nothing burning or blowing up.

This last, I am afraid, was by no means a given. We have form. There was the Christmas Eve on which a mini-pudding in the microwave oven ignited, for example, filling our house with disgusting chemical fumes and black stains on the wall that lingered for months. Or the Christmas Eve on which our oven broke. First, it developed what looked for all the world like a small sun where the fan should have been, while I was baking one of many Christmas cakes. The oven refused to turn off and continued getting hotter and hotter, the sun threatening to turn supernova. The next morning I had to cook Christmas turkey on the stove top and let me tell you, broiled turkey is not something I’d recommend trying.

And finally, there was last Christmas. We’d just moved to the house we’re living in now and I was concerned about how well the ancient oven and barely-working stovetop would hold up. Those, it turns out, were merely the diversion. Instead, the main problems arose early on Christmas morning when I turned on a tap, only for water and other stuff that definitely was not water to come bubbling up from every sink, drain and toilet in the house! Our house is 140 years old, and I am fairly certain most of the pipes share the same vintage. I couldn’t cook: I couldn’t even wash my hands, let alone rinse, boil or clean. As the hours ticked by and we tried desperately to find a plumber who would come out on Christmas Day, I told my husband in despair, “We’ll have to order McDonalds!”

I mean we didn’t - the plumbers arrived in the nick of time and I managed to get food on the table, although I didn’t feel particularly glamorous about it, not having had the time to shower.

My (long-winded) point being, the absence of kitchen disasters is not something I take for granted at Christmas, and to get through not only Christmas Day but the enormous amount of hosting we’ve been doing during the past two months, feels like an achievement to be celebrated.

And so, fresh from a Christmas victory and feeling rather desperate for healthy food after all that festive fare, I have decided to pull Claire’s recipe for ratatouille out, to finish Meals in the Mail for the year with a little bit of French flair and flavour.

I want you to imagine the way Claire presented the recipe in her letter, semi-transparent pages layering one over the other with notes and tiny illustrations at each step. She’s drawn a simple pot and, as each page layers over the next, the steps in the recipe grow, and the pot slowly fills with colour and ingredients.

And once the pot is full and bubbling, Claire writes the following:

“When summer is at its finest, the garden starts to give plenty of treats: onions, eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes are its ‘stars’ and ratatouille is just making the best dish out of the best and freshest veggies.”

This feels a little bit like a mic-drop recipe. “the best dish out of the best and freshest veggies” - what else could we need?

I played around with the ingredients only ever-so-slightly. I added a tin of diced tomatoes and some diced yellow and red capsicum to the onion and garlic, and cooked that down a bit.

Then I replaced one of the zucchini with a pale green squash, and arranged them with the eggplant and tomatoes in a colourful swirl a la the movie Ratatouille. This was done for the sake of the children, who found it fun, but I actually preferred Claire’s medley of flavours all mixed in, so after painstakingly creating the pattern, I deliberately ruined it by stirring and letting everything simmer in one, big, messy, fragrant mix.

I stir-fried some pieces of chicken in five-spice and a slice of lightly-toasted sourdough to serve alongside it (and mop up the juices). My original plan was to make chicken schnitzel and top it with the ratatouille, or to mix the chicken in with the veggie stew. But I got too lazy to bother with the former, and I was nervous about the kids not eating the latter, so I separated things out and, while it doesn’t look pretty, it was just what the doctor ordered.

I needn’t have worried about the children rejecting the ratatouille: even Madeleine, who is deeply suspicious of most vegetables, said, “Mum, this is actually quite good.”

Which is about the highest praise I was ever going to get.

Warmly yours,
Naomi x

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Recipe: Ratatouille

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 onion, minced

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• 1 egg plant

• 2 zucchini

• 3 tomatoes

• aromatic herbs (thyme, parsley, rosemary)

RECIPES:

1. Fry the garlic and onion in a spoon of olive oil for three minutes

2. Add diced eggplant and zucchini and fry for about five more minutes

3. Add diced tomatoes and herbs and let it simmer for 15 minutes

Serve hot, cold, with meat, or alone.