Since veganism has been introduced into our household I’m still struggling with my cheese addiction. Sometimes I can keep my desires at bay; other times I give in to what is surely an ugly scene after which desperate feelings of guilt ensue.  These are invariably followed by passionate declarations of my dedication to veganism.   It’s been an uphill battle for sure, but I still feel like I’m going to succeed. Coffee without milk and sugar is now OK.  I haven’t had an egg since Christmas.   I’ve had the occasional yogurt, the last time being when I tried to soak my tongue in a small bowl of it to take away the pain of testing the hotness of a red chili I was cooking with (it was HOT).   The yogurt didn’t work at all, but slathering my tongue with peanut butter did.  No guilt there.

My now strictly vegan honey had a birthday last week (can I even call him Honey anymore?), so it was my chance to dominate the kitchen and prove I can cook up a multi-course vegan dinner all by myself, without the air being sucked out of the room by others more talented than I.  Friends that we hadn’t seen since January came with their delightful brood, along with permission for me to make the same delicious vegan chili they served us at their place.

I boiled a pile of jasmine rice to go with the chili and then tossed some penne into a pot of Thai peanut sauce that should have been spicier than it was (given the sorry state of my tongue).  It turned out to be so mild that the legion of little mouths that graced our table didn’t have a problem eating it.  I should have added another pepper.  There’s nothing quite as funny as watching a bunch of crying children run into the kitchen to run their tongues under a tap of cold water, is there? I think that when adding spice to a peanut sauce you almost have to overdo it, because the peanut butter naturally quells the spiciness of the peppers – pure genius I say.  Those Thais really had their stuff sorted out.

I needed a vegetable dish and so I tried something I’ve always wanted to make since watching Ratatouille, one of my favourite movies of all time (if you haven’t seen it, watch it – it’s better than Schindler’s List  I tell you).  I wanted to make ratatouille look just like it did on the plate of the feared restaurant critic, Anton Ego.  I wanted to taste the dish that brought him back to his childhood in rural France, where his mother would serve it to him. A dish that can wash away all childhood fears and worries can’t possibly be bad, can it?

Allrecipies.com has a Disney Ratatouille recipe that I used and changed slightly by replacing the yellow bell pepper with zuchini, which added a nice vibrant green to the mix.  Truth be told I just wanted that little coil of ratatouille to sit on my plate, about 3 inches high.  That didn’t quite happen because at the last minute I realized I didn’t have parchment paper to lay on top of the dish, so used foil instead which made it a little less firm that I would have wanted it.  It also didn’t allow for the vegetables to caramelize which adds flavour.  If I had tried to pile up the little slices into that coil they would have slid down unceremoniously into my plate but hey, it was a lot of fun to make.

Then it was the cake.   Up until that moment I didn’t realize that you could make a cake, rich and moist, without eggs but sure enough it can be done.   It was probably the best chocolate cake I have had in a very long time.  And it was mixed and poured in the pan that it baked in.  I added a glaze and some shredded almonds and then couldn’t believe I was just eating flower, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, vanilla, canola oil and apple cider vinegar.

It was AWESOME!

So, after it was all said and done I was told that the dish I cooked wasn’t a ratatouille at all but a confit biyaldi, where chef Michel Guerard baked the thinly sliced vegetables rather than fried chunkily-cut pieces.  Had I been deluded by Disney?  Rused by Ratatouille?  Don’t tell me this now.  Sometimes I just don’t need to know.

Of course I had to wiki my mistake and found that it’s not quite not a ratatouille, and not quite a confit biyaldi either.  The latter replaces the peppers with mushrooms, which I didn’t do.  Another variation of that recipe adds a vinegarette on top, whereas I just drizzed olive oil.  Unless I’ve contravened an international food law, next time don’t tell me.

Besides, who would call a movie Confit Biyaldi anyway?  That just sounds stupid.  There are no rats in the name either.  And there had to be rats.