ratatouille in 2 places

In Greece we would always try to order a lot of vegetables and the restaurant would invariably be out of half of them which would prompt a replacement of stewed meat. Not a bad thing, after working at restaurant where we would frequently run out of half the menu it felt good to be on the other side of the equation, it was just a funny dietary aspirations vs. reality thing. Anyway, one of our last meals we were offered ratatouille instead of stuffed tomatoes and the table resounded with a yes. Not sure if this is a dish of the kitchen at Teréza, something translated differently for our ears, or just actually called ratatouille.

pic by Mac Parsons

Like the French dish you are probably familiar with, Greek ratatouille was also an olive oil heavy stew of vegetables full of onions, zucchini, carrots, and potatoes as well a bunch of herbs from the island. Eating on the windy sidewalk it was nice to have the soft muddy mix as it cooled down from the kitchen. When it’s hot I often think to eat something uncooked and crunchy, but the cooked vegetables felt easy and fortifying. Which is probably why I thought of it again when I was given the opportunity to cook in the middle of a restaurant-driven holiday.

The dinner at “home” (with our friend Trish in Bolsena) was just in time for a vacation meltdown on my part, it’s hard to eat light when you’re eating out anywhere and I was starting to feel fried. I also think very slowly and it can be hard for me to process the sensory information of the meals of a day if you just keep piling them on. Also although people make a lot of seasonal Italian cuisine, it’s not entirely something restaurants in Rome and the surrounding areas subscribe to. So on this night, Trish was going out to dinner and we had the run of her house for the evening. We drove down to town without a plan, but Trish is mostly vegetarian so I wanted to make something she could ostensibly eat if there were leftovers. I really had my heart set on like boiled bitter greens with olive oil and lemon for dinner though slim pickings for that at the grocery. There were however eggplants, onions, zucchini, and peppers. And tomatoes at the house. It was so cheap, I was so happy.

stealing tomatoes from the garden

Though you turn on the stove this is nice because you can be rather lazy about the preparation. I intermittently stirred, played cards, and drank a bottle of Trish’s wine. When everything was cooked, I turned off the stove to let the food cool and finish the game and the wine. We then opened another bottle and ate. Her wines are so herbaceous, even with the different preparation of ratatouille I was reminded of the version of the island. The Gazzetta vineyards that the white wines come from are just down the hill from where Trish lives. Young vines and some of about 40 years, planted a classic mix of the area Procanico, Ansonica, Malvasia in the sandy volcanic soils surrounding the lake. She landed at the spot after working with both Cantina Giardino and Le Coste, two shop stalwarts. Many of the white wines with some skins sit in a category I love, something to have while you are cooking and tasting your food that also carry into dinner. Light enough for the in between, but enough structure for your meal. I tried this again while making pasta when we got home at 3 in the morning. A cold bottle of Bianco Misticanza waiting in the fridge to refresh our pantry raid pasta. More continuity, a nice landing, closing the circle right before bed.

We will have Trish’s wine in the shop for Friday along with many other things, but can put some aside for you if you’d like. DM or email us if you have a craving.

A Ratatouille

My favorite way to do this embraces a different cut for each fruit/vegetable which allows them to remain distinct in their stewed state. Thin slivers of onion, cubes of eggplant, zucchini half moons, strips of peppers, and wedges of tomato. Also you can complicate this by salting your eggplant about 20 minutes in advance to remove some water and bitterness but I am always too hungry. The other thing to note is that what the Greek dish reminds me is that this formalized recipe is likely just a version of a vegetable stew and I earnestly think it is meant to contain what you have on hand. If you have things on hand.

1 onion
1 eggplant
2-3 zucchini depending on the size
1-2 peppers depending on your preference
Enough tomatoes to kind of cover the whole thing (there are so many different sizes follow your heart)
basil
olive oil

Heat the pan over medium heat while you slice your onion into slivers.
Add olive oil, then onions once your oil is heated and let them soften. During this time cut the eggplant into cubes about an inch big on all sides.
Once translucent and your eggplant (and maybe some more oil if it’s too dry) and let the eggplant brown. Add some salt. This takes a while so a good time to prep the rest of your ingredients.
Cut the zucchini into half or quarter moons and the peppers into strips and add to the pan once the eggplant has started to brown.
Slice the tomatoes into wedges and add when the zucchini and peppers are soft.
Let everything cook down together, cool and serve with bread or lentils. If you are feeling lush add some nicer olive oil on top like Lamoresca, an anchovy, and some basil.


Also if you have a gangbusters garden (I do not) this is something nice to stick in the freezer and revisit in the winter.

Bonds we forge with wine

 You may have noticed Rainbow was on vacation last week. Em is visiting wineries and vacationing in Greece and Italy. I am traveling in a beautiful place but one where there isn’t natural wine unless you bring it, and I finally got tired of hauling it here. I’m thinking of what i will taste when I get home. 

Some distance from friends, from my partner, from my pets and my city, Chicago, I am full of nostalgic wine thoughts today. Em wrote an eloquent and nuanced post about sentimentality and wine, one whose complexity I won’t attempt to match. Today I just want to talk about one wine we have in the shop right now. My mind wanders to this bottle, one I’m likely to open this weekend, one that I made memories with which, calling on them, makes me feel warm inside. This wine is kind of a pop star in the natural wine world, and like all pop stars, in my view, its popularity does not make it any less meaningful. 

 https://rainbow-wines.square.site/product/le-coste-litrozzo-rosato/115?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

Em is in Lazio, the winemaking region nearest to the city of Rome, and hopes to visit Le Coste winery next week. The winemakers are Clem, who is French, and Gianmarco, who is Italian. Em’s and my shared feeling about what makes their wines so dynamic these days is the Franco-Italianese energy. They register on my palette like complimentary colors, French blues against orange rust earthtones, provencal lavendar against golden fennel buds. I have synastesia with them. 

The Litrozzo wines are unique from the rest of the bottlings - they are meant to be a little more direct, bottled in liter (litrozzo) for sharing and drinking liberally. The rosato is from the Aleatico grape, considered like the red grape version of Muscat, for its aromatic, floral ways. For a while we didn’t receive the rosato here in Chicago, and I became a little obsessed with having some to drink and sell on the third coast (those were the days when I just wanted things if I couldn’t have them, I’m on the journey of moving as far, far away from that as possible). My partner visited the east coast and drank a bottle of it, and I was so jealous. I saw it on instagram, I could almost smell the Aleatico through the images and my craving grew. 

When I finally had some to sell at Red & White, we sold it pretty quickly, and I didn’t really bond with it. I drank literally two sips of it. A few months later Em and I were having a rare shared night off, and decided to really go all out and each dinner out somewhere together. We went to Cafe Mairie Jeanne, a restaurant now closed that place I miss everyday.  It was winter by this time, and drinking Litrozzo rosato seemed iffy. We weren’t particularly thirsty, and we were going to eat roast chicken. But it was the wine we most wanted to drink abstracted from place and time, and maybe the best price too, so we had it. 

It was such a lovely companion at our table. French fries and juicy, roasted onion smoked chicken with the bold, saline wine, was a delight. Roast chicken dinner earns its revered reputation, and adding fries and a buoyant rose made it a feast. 

The wine at that time was pretty vertical in energy, acidic and very savory, a little nutty and less of the ‘direct’ quality I mentioned - less fruity, basically. This new vintage, by contrast is very freshly fruity and floral. It smells and tastes like tuberose and strawberry and also kind of like the beach, a bit of wet sand, a bit of spf. When we drove it our case of it back from Giambotta, we were in a very scary spot on I-90 where we had to slam on the brakes to prevent a multi-car pile up, and sadly, one of the bottles collided so much inside the case with another bottle that the glass smashed. It was kind of a happy accident, tragic as it was to loose a bottle. My car smelled like candied violet, roses, lilacs, white peaches and red berries for weeks. Now I am bonded with the wine, and the fabric of my car trunk is too. 

Litrozzo Rosato and bianco are both available in the store. We have lots of new wines from Australia - from Lucy Margaux (fresh, herbaceous Pinot Blanc, mineral, juicy Pinot Noir and Persepone Wines (vibrant Gamay and the gorgeous rose, Cuvee Simone, after Chateau Simone in southern France) that are also great for hot dog days of summer. DM @rainbow_wines or email us @rainbowwinechi@gmail.com anytime with wine questions - we love to hear from you. 

The practice of everyday rest & inspiration

Cub and I usually write our blog entries over a few days and give them a lot of thought and an edit or two, but this I am writing and publishing immediately. I am very tired, I find this frustrating because I feel a little disconnected from the reason for being tired. Like I am just being normal, not doing too much extra. A small survey of people that I know that do not know each other are in a similar position, suggesting that this is very common. So I would like to offer a passage from Luce Giard (in The Practice of Everyday Life Vol 2: Living and Cooking) brings me back to reality and a vision of normal. Though I’m not a 1980s French matriarch and our gestures differ a bit this mess of words that follows feels very lived in. 

And before you get to it (sorry) I do think about wine when I think about these words, the amount of errands and gestures and work that is work but also feels like busywork and perhaps isn’t even a winemaking technique that creates something that you experience. For instance, Brent Mayeaux who makes Stagiaire Wine wrote extensive notes about each cuvée we bought from him via Mac/EL Rancho Wine Co. Because of this Cub and I got to hear this story about Let’s Get Fizzical, a Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc pet nat he makes. And I will let Brent tell it: “The bottles were placed in cases upside down to allow the lees to settle to the cap for clean disgorging. In what was one of many frustrations this year, the caps started leaking. The cases got wet and were falling apart. And I was forced to do an early disgorging once my preferred caps arrived in the middle of harvest. That was just 2020.” And now Giard:

Inside: to the kitchen to prepare, from the kitchen to the dining room to serve and eat, getting up constantly to run and check the things on the grill or to fetch the mustard missing from the table; from the dining room to the kitchen to clear away the dishes; once again in the kitchen to wash and put things away. Outside: from the house to the market, to the grocery store, the bakery, the butcher shop, the wine shop, the back to the house, arms fun of shopping bags. On the way you pass a young woman even more heavily laden than you and who mumbles to no one is particular: “I’m just the family packhorse. all I do is carry, carry, carry” inside: to the kitchen to empty the bags, put away the groceries, wrap up the things to be put in the refrigerator, note down the expenses, check the change and the receipts. Sit down finally.

This whole book is available online, I will write about it again because it has influenced my work over the past ten years and I don’t know about that many things. The tired is not just from this doing referenced above, but also maybe a little tired of myself and that I am constantly going to refer to Luce Giard for perhaps the rest of my life.

I need a flush in my cheek and maybe a little extra blood pumping through my veins? I’ve been drinking less often, but only want red when going for a bottle. Maybe because it goes hand in hand with my favorite date in Chicago, burger and fries from Red Hot Ranch on their loud patio with something good. I had Ping Pong from Les Petite Mises the other night and it was perfect. I also would go for Les Valseuses Soul Makossa, anything from La Dernière Goutte, Lamoresca Nerocapitano, Mayga Gamay from Octavin, or L’Enchanteresse. Some extra guts or like a blood surrogate or something. I do wonder about all of the errands that made them happen, but instead I just drink with a little extra appreciation of the unknown. These are in the shop, I recommend sleep if you are physically tired but if you need a little inspiration a little wine can be nice.

Also, I would like to note that Cub & I will be closing the shop next weekend for rest (Aug 12-14) to reopen on the 19th.