Ratatouille

The next cool evening—tonight, or maybe tomorrow, before it hikes up into the eighties again on Wednesday—do this:

Get out a heavy bottomed pot, and some tired eggplant, and a few cracked tomatoes from the garden. Find a green pepper in the fridge, and some summer squash or zucchini, and pull a cutting board out from the shelf. Sharpen the chef's knife, pull down a colander, and cut the eggplant and squash into rounded cubes. Toss the vegetables with salt and leave them to sit—for fifteen minutes, maybe, a half hour—until the moisture pools out of them in little drips.

In the meantime, chop an onion, flick on a burner, crank the radio. Listen to the news and the breeze and the motorcycle that revs up at sunset down the street. Mince a few cloves of garlic from the plant you just pulled up outside, wait for the oil to get hot. Brown the eggplant and then the squash, sipping on a cold beer while your work. Give the onions their turn next—their turn to sizzle, to brown, to sweat. Add the garlic and the tomatoes and let them sputter, simmer, watching the juices steam up and out through the screen. Turn the heat down, finish your beer, and add the eggplant and squash back in. Then taste—add a pinch of salt, let the ratatouille cool down, and get out a stack of containers for the freezer.

This is not—not today, at least—dinner. Make something else easy—a salad maybe, or a stack of sliced tomatoes and basil with fresh cheese—this ratatouille is for January, or February, or maybe March. It's for ratatouille pie, ratatouille plain on pasta, ratatouille baked with two eggs and cheese—in a season where nothing growing is so bright, so warm, so red.


RATATOUILLE PRESERVE

My mother has been making this ratatouille from The Victory Garden Cookbook for as long as I can remember. She puts it up in pints, as each ratatouille pie—essentially a quiche with bacon and mozzarella and ratatouille in it—uses two cups of the preserve.

1 pound eggplant, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 pound zucchini, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
salt
olive oil
1 pound onions, roughly chopped
3-4 medium size garlic cloves, minced
2 pounds tomatoes, cored and roughly chopped
1/4 pound green or red peppers, seeded and roughly chopped (0ptional)
freshly cracked pepper

In a large colander, toss the eggplant and zucchini with salt (roughly a tablespoon). Set the colander aside in the sink for 15-30, so that the salt can draw the moisture out of the vegetables and the juices can drain.

Place the eggplant and zucchini on a clean dishtowel, and pat them dry. Turn the heat up to medium-high under a large, heavy-bottomed pot, add a bit of olive oil, and drop the eggplant and zucchini in. Sauté for 3-4 minutes, or until the zucchini is soft and the eggplant browned. Spoon the vegetables out of the pot and set them aside.

Leave the heat on medium high and add another glug of olive oil to the pan. Sauté the onions for 5-8 minutes, turning the heat down to medium after a few minutes and sweating them until they get soft and translucent. Add the garlic, sauté for thirty seconds or so, and add the tomatoes and the green peppers if you're using them. Cover the pan and cook for 3-4 minutes, then take the top off and turn the heat up to medium high again. Cook "briskly" until the juices have evaporated, about 5 minutes. Add the eggplant and zucchini, then season with salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for another 5 minutes, or until the extra juice from these vegetables evaporates, then turn off the heat and cool to room temperature.

Pack into pint containers for freezing; this recipe should yield 3-4 pints.

Plenty of huzzah

Good morning, everyone. I hope you had a nice weekend. The rain wasn't very nice, I know, or the misty gray drizzle, but we tried to enjoy ourselves anyways. After all, it's important to send off August with plenty of huzzah. We want it to know how welcome it is to return when the time rolls around again.

And of course, the rain felt pretty good in the kitchen. I can't remember the last time I've actually wanted to turn on the oven and cook, but yesterday, I did. I cranked that bad boy right up and cleaned out the fridge. There were chocolate chip cookies—these ones, with an extra pack of Ghiradelli's for oomph—another batch of roasted carrots and fennel for soup, and finally, Marion Cunningham's stuffed green peppers. Here are the cookies, waiting their turn.


Unfortunately, it isn't the cookies I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is the stuffed green peppers, and the picture I have for you of them is not nearly so pretty. (I could go into how a certain four-legged, black-haired member of my family has suddenly developed a rather soft spot for vegetables, particularly good-old fashioned ones baked and heaping with sautéed onions and garlic and tomatoes and oregano with a nice hefty slab of mozzarella plopped down on top, but I'm not sure you'd believe me.) The point is, don't judge these things by their picture. Please. They really are a lot tastier than they look.

In case you aren't quite convinced, here is a list of their top-shelf qualities, in order of importance:

1. They have a layer of melted, crispy-where-it-has-dribbled mozzarella on top, which, if you've done your shopping around here, came from the wonderful woman at the Provincetown farmers' market who sells it fresh on the street and who routinely empties your wallet without you noticing because she is That Good.

2. They are filled with sautéed onions and garlic and tomatoes and oregano and chunks of crusty bread.

3. Do we really need to go on here? If you're not convinced yet, then maybe Marion and I just aren't for you. Heck, if you even needed convincing after all that about the mozzarella, then maybe we're not for you. Even my dog thought these were good. And he does not eat vegetables, people, Ever. (Except for raw green beans. He will sit out on the deck and chew through a whole bushel of them as if they were the best marrow filled chew toy you ever licked. But beyond that, I swear, nothing. Especially nothing slippery, like say, baked peppers and garlic and onions and tomatoes sautéed.) Apparently, there are no safe bets anymore.

Anyways, it's a bit sunnier today I know, so you don't have to make them right away. But the next time it starts to drizzle or maybe even get dark, just think about it, okay? You don't need much—not a lot of ingredients or even time. A trip to the farmers' market this weekend might help, and maybe a pair of slippers and a good, colorful apron, but beyond that, you should be good to go. So enjoy the day, and when you get around to it, let me know how this went.

STUFFED GREEN PEPPERS

If you've never read any Marion Cunningham, you really ought to. She has a wonderfully old fashioned yet practical take on things, and she delivers it all without a fuss. These peppers are a perfect example—fresh and easy and satisfying but very healthy at the same time. I adapted them a bit to fit what I had in my kitchen—her version does not have bread cubes but uses eggplant, which I didn't have on hand—and she also did without the mozzarella on top. Feel free to play around a bit depending on what you have; so long as you keep the tomato-onion-garlic-oregano flavor base, you have a very good chance of success.

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 green bell peppers, halved and seeded
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 large onion, chopped
1 pint very ripe cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 tablespoon fresh chopped oregano
1 slice stale crusty bread, cut into small cubes
salt and pepper to taste
2 ounces fresh mozzarella
4 basil leaves for garnish

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F, and use a little bit of the olive oil to grease a pie plate. Drop the pepper halves into a pot of salted boiling water and put a plate on top of them so they stay submerged. Parboil for 4 minutes, remove, and set aside.

In a large sauté pan, heat up the rest of the olive oil over medium high heat. When the pan is warm, add the onions and the garlic and cook for several minutes, or until both begin to get soft. Add the tomatoes and oregano and cook a few minutes more. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and add the bread cubes.

Arrange the pepper halves face up in the pie plate and stuff the tomato mixture into each. Top each one with a 1/2-ounce slice of mozzarella and bake for 20 minutes. When you pull them out, put a basil leaf on top of all the mozzarella slices, and enjoy the peppers at once. (Marion says you can also eat them cold, but I can only vouch for them hot.)

The Local Food Report: one potato, blue potato

As a kid, I associated each letter of the alphabet with a certain color. A was red, B was blue, C was tan, and so on. (Z, if you must know, was a beautiful, deep forest green.) In my head, when I spelled words out, I could see the colors flying by. My sister's name, Anna, was a blur of red-green-green-red. My mom, Liz, was mostly see-through with a finish of green, and my dad, Jan, was a sort of purple-red-green combo match.

My own name was far more complicated—the letters scribbled out in a long, unwieldy streak. Yellow-white-salmon-blue-yellow-gray-black.

For a while I thought I might be just the slightest bit crazy, but then my sister told me she had an imaginary color-coded alphabet, too. One day, I remember, we got out 52 sheets of paper and wrote out our letters in color for each other to inspect. The colors matched up on roughly half; the others we could not agree on. I have no idea where any of it came from, but X was pea green to my mind, and that was that.

Foods, I used to think, worked the same way. Carrots were orange, tomatoes were red, and blueberries—of course!—were blue. At the grocery store, for the most part, that's still true. But at farmers' markets, it isn't such a sure bet. Enter yellow carrots, green tomatoes, and black radishes. I've seen black raspberries, too, and purple kale and golden beets. The whole Food Is Color Coded theory has really started to fall apart since I started shopping outside. Which leads me to my new friend, the blue potato. Actually, he's really more purple, but we'll let that go.


The Cape Cod blue (or All Blue, as it's technically called) is being grown this year by Ron Backer of Surrey Farms in Brewster. He picked the blues at first because they're colorful and eye-catching and sell like crazy at the markets. Plus they come in around mid-July, in between the early potatoes and the late summer batch, which just so happens to be perfect timing for Ron. But he also decided on them because if he harvests them the right way, he can make them last a month, or maybe even more. He picks them without pulling the plant, by digging his hand into the dirt and feeling around and then—aha!—pinching the purple tubers off. Not every potato variety is amenable to all this reaching-under-its-roots, but the Cape Cod blue seems to tolerate it well. Each week, Ron picks however many pounds of the blue potatoes he thinks he'll sell, and then the next goes back for more. He thinks he has another week or two of this before the gold gives out.

The best part about this picking method is that he can leave the Cape Cod blue plants to self-seed for next year. This saves him the $10 to $15 a pound on seed potatoes, and means that so long as he makes a map of where the crop grew the year before, he can head out in the spring and find a brand new patch of seedlings. Of course, he has to replant them in a new spot in order to avoid pests and diseases (like this year's late blight, which thankfully has yet to hit Ron's farm), but other than that, it's a piece of cake. Transplant, pick, over-winter, and transplant again. Voilá!

All of this easy-pick-and-plant business has given him plenty of time to brainstorm recipes. Like the recipe he came up with for blue potato salad, involving balsamic and peppers and plenty of fresh red onions, sliced.


When I made it I tweaked it a little bit—beefed it up with dill, and mayo, and a little bit of lemon juice—but the basic structure came from Ron. He likes his with a bit of Dijon mustard mixed in, but between the dill and the balsamic I thought we had enough going on. So go ahead—it might not look like your typical potato salad, all russet and cream—but I promise, once you take a bite, you really won't give a hoot.

BLUE POTATO SALAD

In addition to being very, very tasty, blue potatoes are also much richer in anti-oxidants than the plain old white or yellow kind. In my book, that gives you license to make yourself one plate of this salad, and then go back for more.

2 and 1/2 pounds blue potatoes, diced, boiled, and cooled
2 fresh red onions, thinly sliced
2 green peppers, chopped fine
1 bunch dill, chopped fine
1 cup mayonnaise, preferably homemade
balsamic vinegar to taste (I used 2 tablespoons)
sugar to taste (I used 1 teaspoon)
salt and pepper to taste
a squirt of lemon juice

Pull the cool potatoes out from the fridge and dump them into a large mixing bowl. Add the red onions, the green peppers, and the dill. Measure out the mayonnaise in a large measuring cup and whisk in the balsamic, sugar, salt and pepper, and lemon juice until you have a dressing you like. Pour this dressing over the vegetables and toss well. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

Green peppers & dip

It always startles me how late in the season green peppers come in. They rush onto the tables of the last farmers' markets, harried and out of breath but stunning just the same.

I bought my last two over a week ago, on the streets of Provincetown, while a dog fight played out at my feet. I picked them carefully from the finale table, and tucked them atop storage onions and winter squash in my well-laden bag.

They sat at home until just yesterday. Still perfectly crisp, their skin cool and green, they split without caving beneath the weight of the knife. I cut them into slices and arranged them carefully on a plate next to my computer. Word after word I typed, crunching through the sweetest of peppers as the afternoon slipped by.

HERB DIP

Serves 6 to 8

Beat together 1/2 cup mayonnaise and 1/2 cup sour cream. Add 1/4 cup parsley, chopped, 1/4 cup chives, chopped, 2 cloves garlic, minced, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste. (The herbs in my garden are still hanging on. If yours are not, try your own blend of dried herbs in place of the fresh ones). Mix well and enjoy with veggies.