Fat Girl Gone Thin

This Tuesday was my father’s birthday. Sixty-five. A “big one” he tells me. So I invite the family over for dinner, on a week-night, which I know is a mistake.

But this is the least of my worries. What worries me are the varied palates that I have invited to my table.

I know my father’s food habits well. Nothing spicy, no bell peppers, no olives, no tofu. My sister is easy – no cake. For the most part, everyone else will eat anything that’s hot and put in front of them.

The only question left is my four-year-old nephew. Making something that passes his taste tests is more stressful, and might I say, more unpredictable,  than a visit from a New York Times food critic.

I started my grocery list with a text message to my sister:

“Do you think Kai would eat chicken?”

“He’ll eat it but only if there is no yucky stuff on it. Yucky stuff includes anything and everything. I’ll bring a bottle of wine.”

Later in a phone call, she added peeled cucumbers to the ok list.  I saw visions of a candlelit table with plates of unseasoned chicken, white rice and cucumber slices with candles stuck in them. Yumm.

As a general rule I try to make birthday dinners more exotic than the likes of the early bird special at the retirement home, but things were looking questionable.

At the store I scanned the isles for white food. Potatoes are white. Eggs are white. White cheese is white. But potatoes are boring if you can’t do anything to them and eggs have yolks, and those are yellow. I grabbed the cheese, a box of cous couse (it’s off-white, right?)

In the produce department, I went crazy. An eggplant, red onions, portabello mushrooms. It’s not a grown-up dinner if there isn’t at least one thing on the menu that gets rejected – so I decided to funnel all my crazy cookery into that.

Back in the meat department, it was cornish game hens. This because, (1) it is impressive to give everyone their own bird, (2) they’re easy to cook and (3) it’s just like a tiny chicken.

Home from work at 5:30 and dinner at 7:30 – I ran, literally ran, into the kitchen and turned on the oven. A gentle dusting of salt and pepper, and off they went to cook while I multi-tasked hiding unfolded laundry in my bedroom and washing dishes.

As the witching hour arrived, I sliced the veggies and threw them in a bag with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Grill, on. Off I went to set the table.

All told, dinner was ready 15 minutes late. In my mind it was a miracle. More of a miracle was that my nephew left with a tummy full of apples, “chicken” and, as he said, kookoo (this is cous cous in English).

As for my 9-year-old niece. Well, that is a different story. When you’re a bit older, old enough to know that chicken isn’t supposed to look like that and balsamic glaze isn’t exactly a regular in your lunchbox, cous cous seems like the only safe thing on the plate.

Oh well. You win some you lose some. As for the vegetable stack. It got hot praises from the adults at the table. Some even asked for seconds. If you’re interested, here’s the recipe:

Vegetable stacks with herbed ricotta

Slice one eggplant and two red onions about 1/2 inch thick. Place the slices, along with 6 portabello mushrooms (stems removed) in a Ziploc bag with a cup of balsamic vinegar and 1/2 cup olive oil. Allow them to marinate on the counter for two hours.

Grill the vegetable slices and mushrooms on each side for approx. 3 minutes. Just enough to caramelize the vinegar mixture and soften the veggies.

While the veggies grill, mix a small container of ricotta (10 oz.) with 1 tbl. basil and two gloves of minced garlic.

Arrange the mushrooms bottom-side up on a plate, place a dollop of ricotta on top. Add a layer of eggplant and another dollop of ricotta. Finally, add a layer of onion and a final dollop of ricotta.

You can continue to stack these as high as you like, but I stuck with one round of each vegetable.

I find myself in the midst of a sassy, if not wildly sarcastic, book at the moment. Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant … also known as: confessions of sad single people who don’t know how to cook and are too scared to eat alone in a restaurant.

This is the kind of book which I: (a) enjoy reading if for no other reason than the time it allots me to commiserate with my twenty-something cooking homeys, and (b) pretend I don’t enjoy reading so that others continue to believe that I spend my off-hours indulging in Thoreau and writings by dead philosophers.

Irregardless, I found the sumptuous photo of an eggplant on the cover drawing me to the hearty veggie. The one-eyed, one-horned, giant purple people eater of the grocery store. But what to cook with it?

Having already fully embraced the hackneyed reality of being an X-generation gal with both a blog and an obsessive interest in food, I decided it was best to fully embrace the beast and go the extra mile. And what better way to do so than cook Ratatouille … while watching Ratatouille.

And let me say, I think this might be why the French hate us. The fact that Disney can systematically reduce hundreds of years of French culinary innovation into a 90-minute rat-themed film, in which the country’s best chef turns out to be under the control of hair-pulling kitchen vermin.

But it’s a cute film and I’m out of dinner ideas, so there you go. Besides, why be young and single if you can’t decide to just swing into the store and drop $25 on imported anchovies and herbs in order to make a meal based on a kid’s film? My only hope is that the cashier didn’t make the connection between the ingredients in my cart and the 99 cent rental from the movie department.

Thirty minutes later I was in my kitchen, knife in hand, ladybug slippers on my feet – gracefully chopping one eggplant, three zucchinis, an onion, garlic, an armload of cherry tomatoes and some very teeny-tiny fish.

Now, I don’t believe I have ever followed a recipe straight off the page. I’m more of a “dash of this, splash of that” kind of girl – or more appropriately, a “do you think I could use protein powder instead of eggs in this, because I forgot to buy those” kind of girl.

That being said, I highly recommend you follow this one to the T. Doing otherwise will cause an irreversible tear in the space time continuum. Ok, not really -  but it will taste like a plate of inappropriately mixed poo from the community college cafeteria if you don’t. Ok, that won’t really happen either.

Whatever. Bad stuff will happen.

The instructions say to remove the pan from the heat, add a splash of balsamic vinegar and let it cool to room temperature. Which is impossible to do, especially if you missed lunch. I mean, literally, it’s impossible to wait that long. The smell is…..

So you’ll drive in fork first, devour the first few bites and think – meh, not bad.

And then you’ll saunter away, watch some bad Thursday night cable, then come back an hour or so later to make a cup of tea or what have you. And while you’re waiting for the water to heat, your fingers will find themselves picking up a bite from the pan.

And God help you if children are present when this happens because inexplicably and with no warning the words, “Oh shit, that’s good” will fall from your mouth. Honestly. Verbatim, you will say this. So keep the kiddos in the other room for this one.

It’s been a long while since I’ve licked a plate … and the pan, but I must be honest and admit defeat on this particular account.  Just another reason it’s good to be a single gal that loves to cook.

The recipe.