Good Enough For a Rat

So how did the ratatouille turn out, you may ask? AMAZING. I first fell in love with this recipe when we lived on the equator. This is also where I adopted my new philosophies on food. Shopping daily in the market and speaking with the farmers who also happened to be my neighbors, I decided to always eat fresh. Fresh to me means eating food that had a life--recently. Living there, it also meant drinking milk from the cow I called by first name, eating eggs that needed to be washed since they still had actual bird poop on the shell, eating fish with its original head still attached, boiling  tea from bushes on trails I hiked, and sometimes, unfortunately, water so fresh it still had things in it that also continued to live inside my tummy. That’s a bit too fresh but you get the point. What was I talking about, anyway? Oh yeah, the ratatouille. So one day in the market I decided to get all the ingredients to make it. At the time it was one of my little  girl’s favorite movies, so I thought it would be nice to make a project out of it. We lived in a world where everything was foreign- from the language to even the altitude- and I wanted to make my daughter feel comforted by something familiar to her. I soon learned it was this foreign world that comforted her most. She had already conquered the strangeness of it and truly made it her home. After making many new friends and taking some cooking lessons to learn the recipes of the land, finally so did I. The secret to a great pot of rat: roast the peppers under the broiler until the skin scorches, use only fresh herbs, and simmer for at least 40 minutes. I served this along with brown rice cooked in veggie broth and a glass of “Well Read”.