Ratatouille

One of my favorite things to do with squash and zucchini is make ratatouille with it. Ratatouille is traditionally a rustic French dish that packs a lot of flavor and is considered an art to execute perfectly. The dish has become a hallmark of lauded French chefs, and can make or break a restaurant (they even made a movie about it).

My Mom made a version of it when I was growing up that was far from haute cuisine - It normally consisted of cooked veggies with some kind of Ragu sauce thrown over it. The fact that my Mom called it "ratatouille" probably would've made Julia Child turn over in her grave, but it still got me to eat greens I otherwise would've skipped.

So, there's definitely a ratatouille spectrum out there that you can get creative with. Ratatouille can take a few minutes or a few hours, depending on how fancy you want to get with it. I'm going to give you a pretty basic (i.e. non-traditional) version of it to try. If you like that, I'd suggest googling more extreme recipes.

Now, one major difference between the ratatouille that I make and a traditional one: 99% of traditional ratatouille recipes include eggplant. Mine doesn't. Don't get me wrong, I love eggplant, I just prefer to use eggplant as the main component of a dish instead of as a supporting character. A lot of traditional ratatouilles also use alcohol and take a long time to cook down. I don't always have time for that.

And so, on to the recipes. Both are fast, but taste a bit different since one uses a home made veloute-like sauce (with stock, butter, and flour) and the other uses previously canned tomato sauce. I'll give you the option to choose your own adventure in a second...

Ingredients:
- Squash
- Zucchini
- Onion
- 2 tbsp Butter or Olive oil
- Tomato (optional)
- Eggplant (optional)
- Lemon, juiced (optional)
- Flour (optional)
- Chicken or Vegetable stock (optional)
- Tomato sauce (optional)
- Salt & pepper & parsley to taste

Throw all your favorite chopped veggies into a pan with some butter (olive oil if you're vegan) on medium heat with some salt and pepper and cook until everything's soft.

Here's where the 2 possibilities diverge...choice one is a lemon veloute sauce (one of the five French mother sauces) that requires SLIGHTLY more work, and choice two is over in another 30 seconds...

1) Add about a half cup of stock (chicken works best in my opinion, but veggie works too), turn your heat to medium-high, and let it boil down just a little. Take a tablespoon of flour (maybe a teeny bit more than that) and sprinkle slowly into your sauce, stirring the whole time to thicken it up. When everything's sticking together pretty well, add the juice from 1/2 to a full lemon. Continue stirring, taste it, add some fresh parsley, and you're finished. (This option is the one pictured above, with a tomato in there, which adds to the sauce as well).

2) Open a jar/can/whatever of tomato sauce (bonus points if it's home made and home canned), pour just enough in the pan to cover your vegetables until the sauce heats up, taste it to see if it needs anymore salt or pepper and you're finished.

This can be a side dish or put over rice or noodles for a heartier meal.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Butter/olive oil, Salt/Pepper

Braised Endives

I had never cooked with Belgian endives before (not to be confused with the curly endive, which has crazy leaves). My friend Kevin showed me this recipe that was in this awesome cookbook called Canal House.

BRAISED ENDIVES

Ingredients:
- 3 belgian endives (I had two white, one red)
- 1/2 cup chicken (or vegetable) stock
- 2 tbsp butter
- Salt & pepper to taste

Melt butter in pan on high heat.
Brown endives on all sides (this part is really important or else they won't caramelize and will taste bitter later!)
Pour stock in the pan. Once it's been brought to a boil, turn the heat down to simmer.
Cover the pan and braise for 30-40 min (I ended up going closer to 40 min to make sure they were cooked through).
Uncover, turn the heat back up to medium-high and reduce the pan juices.
Serve.

Endives are naturally pretty bitter. If you caramelize them enough and cook them long enough, this should offset the bitterness by a lot. However, they'll still be a little bitter. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Chicken stock, butter

Failure & Ugliness (Gnocci)

I STILL had yukon gold potatoes left over from January (I promise it's not as gross as it sounds. Potatoes, when kept in the fridge, last super-long). However, their continued presence in my life was beginning to become a nuisance to my fridge space.

Since I'd never made it, I decided to whip up some simple gnocci (a pasta-ish dough thing made of potatoes). There's plenty of videos on the internet describing the process of making it. However, it takes a few tries to figure out the correct potato to flour to egg ratio. Gnocci is awesome because it's made of potatoes, which already last super-long, PLUS you can freeze it for up to 3 months MORE once you've made the dough nugget things.

I ended up pairing my gnocci with a home-made tomato sauce I had canned a while back, adding extra sauteed veggies (onion, tomato, whatever's in the fridge), garlic butter, Worcestershire sauce, & folded in some Parmesan cheese with salt & pepper to taste (leave the Worcestershire out if you want the meal to be vegetarian).

The good news was that the gnocci + sauce combo tasted GREAT! The bad news was that...well, it looked like someone blew chunks in a bowl, and my gnocci resembled stillborn cats more than food.
Thankfully, the gnocci made me fondly remember the first hummus I'd ever made and still the best hummus I've ever eaten. It was a spicy roasted tomato hummus that a friend dubbed heavom (tasting like heaven + looking like vomit).
One of my largest regrets in life is not writing down the exact recipe for that hummus. I can basically approximate it (and probably will for a future entry), but it's never been as good as that first batch *le sigh*

I try to make my food aesthetically pleasing (especially when serving it to others), but when you experiment with making things you've never made before, sometimes you end up with something that doesn't taste or look very good. Still, you try to fix your mistakes and avoid them in future batches of a dish. For example, I now know that hummus needs more tahini to coagulate better and gnocci needs a crapton of flour to keep from sticking to its neighbors (I will hopefully write a post soon to redeem my gross gnocci). Lessons learned.

This brings me to one of the coolest things about having groceries out of the trash: I'm more willing to take risks with the food I make. If I mess a dish up and it's inedible, it won't really matter because half the world thinks food out of dumpsters is inedible anyway and I never paid for the food, so it was just time lost. So, I primarily try to make my food into something I enjoy the taste of. If it looks like mush, so be it!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, butter, garlic, salt, pepper, flour, egg