Ratatouille for the rugrats

There aren't a lot of my kids' movies that I enjoy watching myself. "Ratatouille" is one of the few exceptions.



We recently bought this one, so it's been floating around the house the way all new movies seem to do. The boys want to hold it and look at it until we actually take off the sleeve and the plastic wrapping, maybe hoping the characters will materialize if they just palm it long enough. Even Amelia has taken to sucking on the sleeve or cover of these new DVD's, so this movie has been working its way from the living room to the kitchen to the family room to our bedroom and back again.

The other day I was scrambling for dinner ideas and decided to take a gander at what's lurking in the crisper of my fridge. Oh yeah . . . there's half an eggplant that I can't even remember what I used the first half for, and there's that one zucchini still hanging out from a pasta dish I made last week. What on earth am I going to do with half an eggplant and one zucchini? I guess I could make another pasta dish, but we just had some . . . there's gotta be something else I can do with this.



Ready to give up and toss out perfectly good, albeit a week old, produce that yet again I've either forgotten about or stumped myself with in terms of recipes, I noticed the movie sleeve under Millie's highchair. Now, my kids are NOT big fans of eggplant and zucchini, so I knew that real ratatouille wouldn't be an option. I've always wanted to make it, but it's something that only Stephen and I would probably appreciate. Then I thought of a recipe I copied from a cookbook a month or two back: Cornmeal-crusted Roasted Ratatouille Tart from Ellie Krieger's book The Food You Crave.



Very thin slices of the not-so-beloved vegetables atop a cornmeal crust, smothered with mozzarella and Parmesan cheese. Now that they could do. The recipe looked pretty time-consuming, and it did take a little longer than an average dinner, but it definitely wasn't as hard as I'd thought it would be. Thin slices of the veggies roast in the oven and then get layered with the cheese on top of the super-simple tart. Then bake it and eat it. I think even Remy, the high brow foodie rat he is, would approve.