Sometimes I lose track of how much goodness there is in simple dishes and how really pleasing they are. Sometimes I just get tired and don’t want to cook. That’s when grilled cheese, plain pasta or get yer own damn supper are on the menu.

But, the reality is: I cook like a peasant.

I live for peasant food – only a few ingredients, redolent with seasonings. Food that fills your whole mouth with good flavours that are nearly melodic in the way they combine. Food that makes you want to eat the whole pot in one, long, neverending sitting.

Peasant food is farm food. It’s about what’s on hand, and it’s built from scratch (or close to scratch…kind of scratchy?). In the past, there might have been 5 or 6 year-round staples in the pantry or larder, with seasonal highlights like fresh veggies and fruit. If you cook from scratch at all, you likely have several key ingredients on hand in your pantry that will allow you to cook like an Italian, French or Korean peasant.

I love being able to go out to the garden, or rummage around in the pantry,  find this and that, and scrabble it up into something soooo divine it almost hurts when you taste it.

It’s the end of the season in my greenhouse. Today I harvested another 25 lbs of half-ripe and not-at-all ripe San Marzano tomatoes, a few corno di toro red peppers and some eggplants. On the way back in (between deluge downpours) I grabbed a valiant late-season zucchini.

There’s a string of onions hanging on the back of the kitchen door. And another dozen of Lindsay’s best eggs just came home with me last night.

An abundance of ideas go through my head, including one for a yummy sounding eggplant roulade that I’ve been planning to try for a few weeks.

But then something made me pause and look at the glorious mound of green, red and purple on the kitchen island. And I didn’t want to taste anything but those ingredients.

So today I made ratatouille.

Just like in the movie.

And just like in the movie,  it was heavenly.

the raw ingredients for ratatouille

So good.

So simple.

Filling and satisfying.

Recipe is dead easy:

Gather up 1 onion, 2 garlic cloves, an eggplant (skinned and seeded if you want), a red pepper (seeded), a zucchini and 3 or 4, maybe 6 tomatoes (skinned and seeded if you want). Chop ‘em all up.

Grab your biggest, heaviest skillet and saute the onion and garlic in 2tbsp olive oil, then add the eggplant , saute until the onions are golden and the eggplant translucent, then turn the heat up and toss in a ¼ cup of white w(h)ine.

Toss in the pepper and zucchini, cook for a few minutes more, until the zucchini is translucent, then throw in the tomatoes. After a few minutes, add ¼ tsp each of thyme, oregano, a touch of ground coriander and a ½ cup of basil.

Let it all stew down slowly over a low heat. Totally edible within 20 minutes of starting to cook, or after an hour. Good cold or at room temp on toast (mmmm).

That’s supposed to serve 4 but two of us hoovered it down pretty easily. Maybe if there was a 2nd course it would have been enough…