Remi’s Ratatouille And Other Adventures In Cooking

recently consumed

recipe: ratatouille from the movie

tasting notes

I love having a new cooking challenge every week. While some of them are not worth writing about, I’m hoping that some will inspire me with some topic for my blog. For instance… I’m very excited to try out one of my new spices, juniper berries, because they are so strange. Apparently, pregnant women are not allowed to eat them? So, I’ve got to figure out what that is all about.

My first cooking challenge was to try and use some of the persimmons I snuck back in my suitcase from the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market in San Francisco. I had never heard of persimmons, but had seen weird orange tomatoes growing on trees in Tuscany.

After I returned someone informed me that these were the fruit known as persimmons, which taste somewhat like a milder mango to me. I baked them into a bread, but it didn’t really bring out the flavor of the fruit like it could. In retrospect, I should have smuggled more persimmons or I imagine they would taste good as part of a sweet and spicy sauce for meats, like mango habanero.

This week, I decided (based on an eggplant that needed to be used up in my fridge) to attempt to cook ratatouille. Now I have cooked ratatouille in the past, and while good, it has never been quite as delicious as the ratatouille I had while in France. I’m hoping a French cookbook I got will shed some light on their secrets. Anyway, my goal this week was not to emulate the dish I had in France, but to attempt the fancy artful ratatouille that was featured in the Disney film (pictured above).

While mine wasn’t quite as beautiful (the picture is pre-baked, so I had made no attempt to “plate” the dish), it was still a more elegant twist on a traditionally rustic dish. In fact, I wouldn’t mind trying to do a few more elegant rustic dishes, or maybe try a few more movie-inspired dishes in the future.

suggested pairings

• Recipe for Persimmon Bread, which is good but a little bland… I added a lot more spices which helped, but I needed more persimmons
• And, of course, Remi’s Ratatouille recipe

technorati tags: persimmons, ratatouille