Ratatouille For Freezing: It's Either Now, Or Next Year!
I know it's a little over the top, but Lisa and I couldn't help but make festive little still lifes with these farm fresh vegetables. I know what you're all thinking about the tomatoes...what dirty minds you all have!!!!!
If you weren't thinking it before you are now. Isn't this cute tomato NOSE too original? But stop looking at it for one second please, to enjoy the beautiful eggplants. We picked them at Bernard's Farm and maybe went a little crazy. We picked a big bucket of them because it was impossible to stop searching for more gorgeous ones, it was like a treasure hunt, finding the next color, the next variety hidden in the long rows. I want to plant a million varieties in my own garden next year. You would know what food geeks Lisa and I really are if you witnessed our fifteen minutes spent admiring these picked beauties once we got them back to her place. Not even two giant buckets of shiny red tomatoes could distract us from ooohing and ahhhing. I think money is great and all, but you wouldn't catch me sitting in my store room counting gold coins even if I had any. But if I was a farmer and had this much abundance, you would find it difficult to drag me away from my root cellar or pantry where I would be ogling my enormous piles of vegetables. Just call me farm-girl Mathilda.
Little Elena (Lisa's three year old Horse Princess) helped prepare the eggplant on the grill by liberally sprinkling salt on them. How cool is it that some of the salt turned the color of the eggplant skin? How could I not take a picture of that?
Normally you make ratatouille by sauteeing the eggplant, but as you will soon observe, we had no stove space to do that so we grilled half of them and broiled the other half. This worked out fantastically. I have to admit that the broiled ones were the most wonderfully aromatic and lush of the two groups. Here: Farm-girl Greta watches over the eggplant.
See what I mean? Can you almost smell them?
Three pots of ratatouille and one of tomato sauce.
Dinner at the end of a really long day of work. I have to tell you that it turned out to be the best ratatouille I have ever eaten. Obviously we did not follow traditional methods of preparing the ratatouille, so there may be some really anal-retentive people out there just waiting to say that this isn't the real deal. Do I care? NO WAY. I'm not a purist. I think it hurts people's brains to worry too much about details like that. Ratatouille is generally cooked in layers in big pots. But when you're making enough to send Napoleon's troops back into Paris, you have to find new ways of putting it all together. I've already mentioned how we cooked the eggplant, and I'm not positive, but I'm willing to bet that the method we chose actually added some depth of flavor to the whole dish. The onions were sauteed first, then we added the zucchini, then the roasted and broiled eggplant, the tomatoes were next, and then we added the truck-load of garlic we had waiting on the side-lines. We were really WINGING it the whole way. My friend Chelsea (an amazing cook) would have been proud of me that day.
We waited (as everyone should) to add the basil til the very last moment. We used almost two whole bunches per pot, julienned by yours truly. Meanwhile, for many hours, a pot of tomatoes was cooking down. I now know what Italian cooks spend most of their time doing. Cooking down sauce. It might have taken less time if we had let them drain first, and if we had followed the general wisdom that if you are making a tomato sauce: squeeze out the seeds. I always figured people just have a prejudice against tomato seeds. Now I get it. Farm-girl Mathilda has learned that seeds contribute lots of JUICE to the pot. How was it in the end? We added lots of garlic (but not enough to overwhelm the tomatoey goodness) and a ton of julienned basil...WOW. Totally worth the time it took. I will make more next year.
The tomato season is closing. It's raining which prevents ripening and also splits the fruit. The nights have turned very chilly. Lisa and I managed to can a total of thirty nine quarts of diced tomatoes, sixteen frozen dinners of ratatouille, and eight portions of tomato pasta sauce for the freezer. If we were true homesteaders I'm afraid our families would not be making it through the winter...but happily we're not. Never-the-less, I feel so satisfied that we got so much put away. It's been lots of work but the kind that makes you feel sunshine in your blood. I'm looking outside right now at the slow drizzle, the steely sky spread out over town, and I know I can pull out a bag of ratatouille from my freezer any winter day like this and serve up a rich summery feast. A reminder of the plenty our lives are filled with right now. A shot of warmth that goes right down to the bones. You can't put a price on that.
We waited (as everyone should) to add the basil til the very last moment. We used almost two whole bunches per pot, julienned by yours truly. Meanwhile, for many hours, a pot of tomatoes was cooking down. I now know what Italian cooks spend most of their time doing. Cooking down sauce. It might have taken less time if we had let them drain first, and if we had followed the general wisdom that if you are making a tomato sauce: squeeze out the seeds. I always figured people just have a prejudice against tomato seeds. Now I get it. Farm-girl Mathilda has learned that seeds contribute lots of JUICE to the pot. How was it in the end? We added lots of garlic (but not enough to overwhelm the tomatoey goodness) and a ton of julienned basil...WOW. Totally worth the time it took. I will make more next year.
The tomato season is closing. It's raining which prevents ripening and also splits the fruit. The nights have turned very chilly. Lisa and I managed to can a total of thirty nine quarts of diced tomatoes, sixteen frozen dinners of ratatouille, and eight portions of tomato pasta sauce for the freezer. If we were true homesteaders I'm afraid our families would not be making it through the winter...but happily we're not. Never-the-less, I feel so satisfied that we got so much put away. It's been lots of work but the kind that makes you feel sunshine in your blood. I'm looking outside right now at the slow drizzle, the steely sky spread out over town, and I know I can pull out a bag of ratatouille from my freezer any winter day like this and serve up a rich summery feast. A reminder of the plenty our lives are filled with right now. A shot of warmth that goes right down to the bones. You can't put a price on that.