Ratatouille...the dish, not the movie.

I cook a lot, and like it. There is, however, a list of foods that I have never cooked with. Not sure why this is...I think there are several reasons: 1) I don't like a particular food; 2) I'm afraid of the food (weird, I know, but you all have to admit that there is some food item somewhere in the world that scares you); 3) cooking that food just doesn't particularly strike my fancy.

Tonight I cooked a lot (well, not that many, but for the number of them in one evening it seemed like a lot) of foods that fall under categories 1 and 2 and maybe even 3.

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I little back story: My place of employment is a place that houses a lot of people who are very food oriented. We are constantly eating or talking about eating. There are staff members who often bring breakfast in, or those random chocolate cakes that we call breakfast, only due to the time of day we eat them. There is also a steady flow of potlucks that are spread throughout the year. We try to create "health oriented" potlucks every once in a while (near Valentines Day we have the Heart Health Potluck-I guess that is really the only one I can think of).

Because of the amount of gardeners we have and our goal to be somewhat "healthy" while gorging ourselves we recently decided that we would have a "Veggie Potluck". I being the unvegetarian meatlover that I am, don't cook vegetarian specific dishes. Yes I have the green beans, the corn, carrots and peas as side items. But putting them all together to make a main dish? That is a challenge. I decided to first turn to my trusty cookbook and found a recipe for Ratatouille. I looked up variations online and decided to steer away form a recipe calling for a "fireproof casserole". I also consulted a friend who is a vegetarian. In the end I returned to the good ol' Betty Crocker. I decided to make a "test" dish before making it for all my co-workers. Didn't want to make anyone sick or anything.

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So tonight I headed to the store. I bought lots of food items that as I said earlier, fall into the categories listed above. I never used to like zucchini-bought it, same goes for yellow squash-bought it, same again for bell peppers-bought it. The eggplant though, that is a food that has always scared me. Why? I don't know. I learned my lesson tonight-you should always try something that scares you, the end result might just be wonderful. Until this evening, cooking any of these foods didn't particularly strike my fancy. The recipe looked good, and I needed a dish to share at work. Let's try it. Ratatouille, here I come.

After lots of dicing, boiling, simmering, I think I found a good dish. A dish I would probably make again (which is a good thing seeing as how I need to take the replicated dish to work next week). One change though, which would snap the vegetarian title off this dish...yes, I would add some meat...I'm thinking some sausage for a bit of spice.

After making this dish, I do want to watch the movie again. Maybe a weekend rental?! Also, I will experiment with some other eggplant recipes. I think it could be a new favorite food!