Don't judge me!

Yeah yeah yeah...so I don't put in entries like a faithful blogger should. And you know what? It really doesn't matter - you're not reading my blog anyway. That's right, I'm talking to you, whoever you are, not reading my blog. So I must blog for myself just because I feel like it; it's just for me because I like to write and if I talked incessantly about myself (which is my allowed indulgence here), people would hate me. Oh wait, I do that anyway. Well you can just talk to the hand then, haters! Do people still say that?

So let's get down to business. I promised that I would begin working my way through Julia Child's baking book. I was going to start at the beginning and go through to the end. Aaaaannnnnddd...I haven't started. You know, I'm just not feeling bread and brioche and puff pastry when we can't even figure out from one day to the next whether it's going to be 80 degrees and 100% humidity, or 40 degrees and so dry there's static in the air. It makes me unsettled and makes me not want to bake, especially things that are a labor of love, like puff pastry, and hours of adding butter and folding and turning and rolling and chilling... You have to sort of psych yourself up and then go for it. And I wasn't in the mood.

What I did to was take a look into the cookbook that I have been pretty fearful of: Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Remember I said I was going to do the "Julie-Julia" thing but I was basically too overwhelmed and quite the coward and decided it was too much for me. And then soemthing happened. Over the summer I had a farm share. "What's that?" you ask...it's a local farm that offers shares of it's harvest over the season. So for the summer, once weekly, we'd head over to the farm and pick up our box full of fresh veggies for the week. And every week it was different, both in variety and volume. Some weeks it was tons of Swiss Chard, other weeks it was all herbs, and other times a mixture. My freezer is now full of oregano, mint, blanches chard, blanched green beans, etc. But one week in particular I found myself looking at tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, onions, among other things. So what do I do with this...and I thought ratatouille. And no I didn't thinkof it because I'm brilliant and knew all the ingredients off the top off my head. Actually I literally thought of the scene in the movie Ratatouille where the little rodent actually makes the dish and serves it a man who practically cries because it reminds him of his mother and home. So that inspired me - I mean why not? I have the ingredients, so what the heck. Go for it.

I actually didn't turn to Julia first. I went to one of my favorite sources. I have a few: Joy of Cooking (the cooking Bible, according to me), Martha Stewart (I have a couple of cookbooks of hers), and epicurous.com. So I checked epicurious first and yep, I appear to have the right ingredients. Then I did a general web search to see if I could find another recipe to compare to, and a link for Julia's recipe comes up, which actually had a pdf version of a copy directly from the book. Excellent! I have that book! I don't need no stinkin' pdf! So I'm off and running!

So page 503 - Ratatouille. Julia says that it smells like the "essence of Provence". Excellent! Because this is probably as close to smelling Provence as I'm ever going to get. And it goes well beef, which is great because we're grilling steak (and by "we" I mean "the man, not me"). It also says a really great one is "one of the quicker dishes to make". I am confused by this because I don't know what it means. Is it quicker than a bad Ratatouille? Or is it quicker than say, beef bourguignon, which takes something like...oh I don't know, a week and a half to make. Doesn't matter, I am forging ahead, dammit. I will say that MAFC is very thoughtfully laid out, but if you are seriously going to make something from it, READ THE RECIPE all the way through first. And maybe more than once. So this quick and easy recipe, which by the way can also be served cold, only has 6 steps, and 10 ingredients, starts with using an enameled skillet. Who the heck has an enameled skillet?! I have enameled stock pots, bakeware, a beautful Chantal enameled roasting pan that is too nice to actually cook in, but a skillet? No. And why? Well, too late now, we're using my normal heavy stainless skillet and that's that. So you go through this very long process of slicing your vegetables a certain way, peeling and seeding tomatoes, layering things in a certain order while they simmer away in the [wrong] pan. Somewhere along the line you are suddenly putting things into a casserole...well never mind that either, I missed that.

The end result was a wonderful mixture of these vegetables from a local farm, all mixed together, even melted together, it seemed. B loved it but I can't go by his reaction, he eats everything that's not moving and some things that are. Kids were meh about it - they eat all these things but were suspicious of them all in one mixture together. And then a miracle - a friend of my Puddin's who stayed for dinner. She ate it. All of what was on her plate. And did not say she didn't like it, it looked wierd, I don't like it (without actually tasting). Ate it and said thank you and had more. And her father is a chef who does cooking competitions in Europe. So my ratatouile was validated, at least to me. It was edible and worthy of a second portion.

But here's the real kicker: this child have the most wonderful table manners I have ever seen in a person under the age of 16. She sat down to dinner, put her napkin on her lap, made polite conversation, cut her own met, and at the end of the dinner, she thanked me. AND when I was putting dishes in the dishwasher, all of a sudden she was standing behind me, had already scraped her leftovers into the trash, and asked to put her dish in the dishwasher. I actually had a tear in my eye. I thought to myself "how can I keep you"? THAT was just mind-blowing. I'm lucky when my kids realize thatI'm there, never mind clean up after themselves. I was flabberghasted.

What wil I make next? I was thnking about reading Julia's section on eggs and omelets. Maybe some bread? We'll see... Hoping I'm motivated, otherwise this could take an awfil long time to make any headway. We'll see... I do like eggs...