Quick Ratatouille Recipe
Prepare fresh or freeze to preserve summer’s wealth of hearty vegetables.
A primer to the current traditional food movement, Eat Right: The Complete Guide to Traditional Foods, with 130 Nourishing Recipes and Techniques(Kyle Books, 2017) by Nick Barnard, offers achievable and simple ideas, recipes and advice on how to be fully nourished by traditional foods in a modern world. Today more people want to know where their food comes from and are interested in more traditional methods of cooking, which is at the heart of Barnard’s debate on food production and consumption. The following excerpt is from Chapter 6 “Vegetables and Sides.”
By mid- to late summer, once you’ve had your fill of the wealth of fresh tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, and eggplant spilling over the stalls at farmers’ markets, and from your garden or farm share, it’s time to make lots of ratatouille to enjoy freshly made or to freeze. The summer and early fall glut of fresh vegetables is a boon, but they don’t keep, and so our recent ancestors spent much time preserving this wealth by fermenting, cooking, and sealing in a jar, or if very frontier, by cooking and canning themselves. We have the luxury of freezing to add to these preservation techniques. Cut the vegetables to a similar size, not too small, as you don’t want your ratatouille to be at all mushy.