What I ate this week
Raffi Melkonian at 11:25 PM
It's June! That not only means that many of the summer vegetables are heading to the market, but also that heavy dinners sit too stolidly on the stomach to be comfortably eaten in the air-condition-less torpor of my flat. The solution is light, happy fare - like the two recipes I note below. As for my birthday on Friday (June 3), I had a pleasant lunch with some law school friends, and then stole away home for my real treat - a small linzer tart of home-made raspberry jam and short crust pastry.

Ratatouille - My mom's ratatouille is just a medley of vegetables turned quickly in some olive oil with lots of garlic, and then put into the oven until cooked. It's perfectly tasty, but I discovered this week that the traditional French recipe for the stew is actually rather more involved.

Specifically, a real French ratatouille is made by slowly sauteeing the vegetables in a pan over a low flame, starting with the hardiest of the ingredients and only adding the most delicate at the very end. This technique not only keeps the last entrants into the stew fresh tasting and crisp, but also yields a light, "syrupy reduction", in the words of Richard Olney - that is to say, a tasty sauce.

For my own version, I started onions and garlic, and then with a couple of artichokes, cleaned and turned with a paring knife, and rubbed with lemon to preserve color. Fifteen minutes later, the eggplants went in, with some extra olive oil, followed by some nice bell peppers and asparagus. Finally, I added four summer squash for a quick ten minute sweat. The result, cooled in the fridge overnight, and mandatorily lightened with some lemon, was extraordinary. The oven based home ratatouille is great - but this thing is something else.

Salad Nicoise - I read somewhere that Salad Nicoise never tastes quite as good at home as it tastes on a southern French beach, your toes digging into the warm sand. While that's true, I find it makes a perfectly nice dinner. The only really doctrinal ingredients are green beans (cooked for ten minutes in salted water, and then shocked in ice), those small nicoise olives, tinned tuna preserved in olive oil, and a hard boiled egg. Otherwise, let your imagination roam free.

By the way, the one thing that makes Nicoise better at home is that you can toss each element in dressing before plating. Bistros in a hurry pull composed salads out of the fridge, and drench them with dressing from on top. Not good.