“If you are what you eat, I only want to eat the good stuff.” —Remy the Rat
If you squint, ratatouille is practically indistinguishable from summer itself. It’s a dish you make when the tomatoes, eggplant, and zucchini are all accumulating faster than you can use them. Thus, it is both a way of enjoying this abundance and also of dealing with it by preserving its components at their peak freshness. Those components are zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, onion, garlic, and fresh herbs. Cooked together with olive oil and salt, these earthy treasures add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.
