So, someone asked me for my ratatouille recipe. I guess I can throw that together.

It's customary to begin these recipes with a long and winding story about how you came to discover that a particular food exists. So, in the beginning, there was nothing. Skip forward past a whole bunch of murders and "begats", and people generally being shitty to each other, and I watched a movie about a mind control rat. I quite liked the movie, because the rat spends the movie going "Fuck the police, I'm going to do what I want". Anyway, I thought it might be fun to try to make the signature food from the movie, and here we are.

I should also warn that I am not a Michelin starred chef. I have zero stars, people. This is also only because the Michelin tire company does not have a system for awarding negative stars. If they were to give any sort of rating to my cooking, it would usually be "All Weather".

So, I am not going to be giving exact amounts here, because that's not how I roll in the kitchen. Everything's going to be pretty approximate.

The core of the ratatouille is four vegetables: Tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, and eggplant. We're going to start with roughly equal amounts of each. If you have to err on the side of something, err on the side of tomato. When I say equal amounts, I mean by volume rather than by number. We're not doing one eggplant to one tomato here. I go with Roma tomatoes, because they're often cheaper, and they taste better.

We're going to want to peel our tomatoes, and this is ignorant work unless you cheat. So we first get a pot of boiling water, cut an X shape into the bottom of each tomato, and they go a few at a time into the boiling water for a minute or two so the skins can get loose. Then they get taken out, dunked in cold water to chill them off, and peeling them becomes a breeze. I know someone out there is going to be horrified and is going to mention that we're losing valuable nutrients this way.

Let me be clear: We are not medieval peasants here. We've got spare nutrients. No one reading this is going "Gee, pa, this was a real thin harvest--how will we survive the winter?" You'll live. Trust me on this, it's not worth it.

Plenty of recipes online will tell you to use canned crushed tomatoes, or tomato sauce. These recipes are written by terrible people who hate flavour, and you should not listen to them. Fresh tomatoes. We're not fucking around with a whole lot of cooking to achieve bland.

Once you've got your tomatoes peeled, roughly chop them up into chunks, and they can go in your Giant Ass Stock Pot (GASP) to start stewing. Don't worry too much about the sizes here, the tomatoes are going to melt down into delicious tomato goo.

Our other core vegetables are going to be a bit more work. For the zucchini, peppers, and eggplant, all of them need to be cut up into bite-sized chunks. Each of them then needs a brief trip to a hot frying pan so you can put some browning on them. You can skip this step, but you will achieve a vastly inferior product in the end. Remember what I said about we're not doing all this work for bland? Do the frying pan thing. It's important. I'm not going to give exact specifications for bite sized. You know your own mouth, you know what fits in it. Pick a size you'd enjoy putting in your mouth in the dinner table context. Use olive oil for frying.

After you finish browning each round of vegetables, it can go into your GASP. There's no real magic here, just chop vegetables until your cutting board is full, then brown, then toss into your GASP to make room for the next round. This'll take you a little while.

Your core vegetables, on their own, are going to need some help. So, we want onion here. Not as much as your core vegetables, and give it a bit of brown too. Same goes for garlic. Personally I like enough garlic that it makes the UN weapons inspectors nervous, but your mileage may vary here.

You'll also want spices. If you have a Herbes De Provence mix, then congratulations, this shit is going to be easy. Chuck an amount in there that you figure will taste good. I don't know how much this is, because I don't know how much veggies you threw in there. Maybe you're making this for two people. Maybe you've got a giant witch's caldron full because you're feeding sixty. Hopefully this isn't your first time adding spices to things. IF you don't have the Herbes, you want thyme, basil, oregano, maybe some parsley.

You're also going to want salt. And you're going to want more salt than you think you want. You know why food always tastes so amazing at a restaurant, and then kind of disappointing when you cook at home (if you're like me and have zero stars)? It's because restaurants put in embarrassingly large amounts of salt and butter.

Eyeball it to see how much oil is in there after your vegetables went in. Often you want to add a little more olive oil, but keep in mind that this is a stew and not a lubricant.

Cook everything together until it reaches the desired consistency. Generally this means your vegetables are soft, but not baby food. But again, this is a matter of taste. It'll still be delicious if you turn it into a puree, but generally a little bit of texture is good. Probably will take a couple of hours.

Ratatouille is excellent the day you cook it. It's even better the day after. Don't eat it if you've waited until it's got mold.

Online you'll find all sorts of fancy preparation/pairing/etc suggestions. This is peasant stew, folks. Pair it with great big chunks of bread covered in butter. Skip the bread if you've got celiacs in your group.

That's about it. It takes some effort in terms of slicing and browning and so forth, but it's pretty simple overall. This is a recipe that is overall fairly hard to screw up. If you're like me, you'll manage that anyway a few times before you nail it.

Anyway, that's it. Again, this is a peasant food, so you don't need to be super accurate about anything.

Enjoy!