Y'all remember that movie Ratatouille? It's about a rat named Ratatouille who burrows into some hopeless dude's brain and makes him cook food, culminating in the duo cooking some vegetables for a man who's angry about his pointy nose, and then the restaurant gets shut down because the rat's family kidnapped a bunch of people and locked them in the walk-in. Anyway, I watched it once back in...2018 or 2019 or some shit, and decided last night I was gonna cook vegetables like the rat.
Granted, I was operating solely off of my memory of the movie, and I have never looked up a ratatouille recipe, so it was mostly guesswork, which is probably why it wasn't spectacular like Angry Nose Man thought.
I started off by slicing up half of a yellow squash, half of a zucchini, and the tip of my fucking middle finger on my mandolin, then, after the bleeding subsided some and I got a bandage applied, I used my knife for a couple of tomatoes. I just stacked them all horizontally (two squash, two zucchini, one tomato) in a casserole dish, seasoned with some salt and pepper, drizzled with some extra virgin olive oil, and put a sheet of foil over the top before baking it in the oven at 350 until I got bored. About 20-25 minutes or so in (my range display just shows the temperature when the oven is running, so I don't really know the time, but I think it was somewhere in that range), I removed the foil, added some green onions, black pepper, and olive oil, then stuck it back in for a little while longer.
While I was waiting on the veggies, I went ahead and diced up some garlic and red onion, sliced up a couple of mushrooms, and minced some basil leaves for spinach. The green onions in that pic were for the veggies; ignore them.
I started the onion and garlic in some butter and olive oil at a medium-low heat just to get them sweating a bit. Once they were starting to really cook, I dumped in my mushroom and kept that going until the shrooms started to soften.
It was now spinach time. I just dumped that shit in there and kept stirring occasionally for a couple of minutes.
Seriously, spinach shrinks so fucking much. I added a bit of salt and pepper, stirred it a little more, then looked at the veggies in the oven, which were still boring as fuck.
So I added some white wine and cream to my spinach pan and just let that all simmer and slowly cook down for a little bit.
Oh, yeah, I also added a metric fuckton of Romano cheese, as well. The amount in the picture is about a third of what I added. I just kept adding cheese and stirring it in, then kept the pan on a low heat and slowly reduced the sauce.
Just a quick shot of the finished product. Luckily, I had some purple rice going in my rice cooker, too, and it took forever and a damn day to finish, so I had plenty of time to reduce the shit out of the spinach.
I decided tonight was the night to be extra with my plating. I started off by spooning and spreading a layer of the spinach onto my plate. I picked up a 3" PVC connector from Home Depot this weekend (and washed it twice by hand and once in the dishwasher because I don't trust people), and I used the 3" tonight. I just pressed it down into the spinach as near to the center of the plate as I could.
My purple rice was still slightly undercooked, but it was very edible and fairly tasty. I packed it into the PVC as best I could. I need to figure out some way to level things off inside of there, but for tonight, this was good enough.
Next up was some of the veggies. I tried to stack them as artfully as I could while also trying not to fucking starve to death. I need to learn not to be extra when I'm hungry.
All that was left was carefully removing the pipe without knocking everything over. I stuck a single basil leaf on top because...extra. Whatever. It looked, smelled, and tasted amazing, so I'm gonna forgive myself for that. I need to practice purple rice some more, and also probably look up a ratatouille recipe, but, other than that, I don't have many complaints.
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