Ratatouille

I love ratatouille.

I first made it in London with my sister-in-law. And the whole time we were cooking, other hostel-mates kept asking us "why are you making ratatouille", as though using the hostel's kitchen was a strange occurrence. By the way, that question should always be answered with: Why aren't you making ratatouille?
I mean, ratatouille is delicious! It's like making a vegetable pasta sauce/stew that you're going to eat all on its own. It's colourful. It's healthy. It's - well if you haven't tried ratatouille then you just don't know what you're missing.

And there are so many ways to make ratatouille. You can bake it. You can cook the whole thing in a frying pan. You can just order it in a restaurant. The possibilities are endless!

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A few days ago I was shopping at the absurdly overpriced St John's Sobeys that people flock to for its free plastic bags... and overpriced everything else (really makes you question people's priorities). However, in the midst of the $7 per lb apples I found on-sale-peppers! Now, like any normal person, my immediate thought was: I could SO make ratatouille with these!

But I didn't. Nothing else required for making ratatouille was on sale... because its Sobeys. Instead, THAT night, I made chicken soup from scratch (without the noodles). The next day though, I went to the Dominion, which is just Loblaws with an identity crisis, and I bougth:

Ingredients
eggplant
zucchini
onions
garlic
peppers (already purchased)

And home I went to make my ratatouille... except that took a while because I FaceTimed my family and we talked ALL afternoon. I didn't get anything done.

oops.

Well, that's not completely true. I finally realized that I was on a camera phone and propped up my phone in the cupboard while I put on a cooking show... and sadly, this is not the first time I've done this. I think the apron gives me an alter-ego or something.

Anyway, so there I am, showing off spices and ingredients and talking about what I'm doing, until I get to my zucchini. I quickly learned that it wasn't a zucchini at all.

It was a cucumber.

Now, before you think that I can't tell my vegetables apart, let me just say that even the receipt rang this baby in as a zucchini. This was one convincing cucumber. It was a cucumber on a mission. Well too bad for the cucumber, I had no use for it in my ratatouille - or any other dish. Instead I chopped up the rogue vegetable and stuck it my fridge to await its fate.

I still had all my other ingredients, plus a squash, so I made some sort of curried eggplant/pepper/squash soup. It was lumpy and delicious... but it was not ratatouille :(