Last summer I had my friend Amanda, who is vegan, and her boyfriend over for dinner and made ratatouille. I chose it because it's one of the few dishes in my repertoire that doesn't rely on cheese, but it happened to be shortly after the Pixar movie came out. Steve peered into my simmering pot of vegetables and said, "I didn't know it was a real food." It is a real food and is, as Colette says in the movie, "a peasant dish." It's hearty, simple, and delicious. Eggplant is the main vegetable along with peppers, zucchini, and onion. Chop them all up and saute with some garlic, spices and tomatoes. All you really need is patience, no special skill involved. It's a comfort food. We ate it often enough in my family during the summer when the vegetables were at their tastiest.

I'd been meaning to see the movie Ratatouille ever since it came out, but since I'm cheap I wanted to wait until it came out on video. I finally snagged it from the library yesterday and settled down after dinner to watch. Pixar makes such gosh darn beautiful movies. I loved all the scenes of Remy scampering through buildings or dancing around the rim of a soup pot. And yes, it made me miss Paris. But what really got me was the look on that little rat's face when he's watching a cooking show with his culinary idol, Chef Gusteau, whose motto is 'Anyone Can Cook.' As Gusteau talks about loving and savoring the many tastes and textures of food, Remy stares at the tv screen with this expression of overwhelming, teary-eyed happiness, wordlessly saying "Yes! I understand!" I know that they chose ratatouille as his finale dish because it has the word 'rat' in the name, but I did like that it wasn't a traditional show-stopper. Even though Remy's way of cooking and serving it looked nothing like mine, it's the reaction the dish has on the harsh critic Anton Ego that's important. And I think that's what I love about cooking for people: if not that madeline-in-the-tea moment of nostalgia, then the creation of a new memory that someone will one day look back on fondly as 'that time we had dinner at Anna's.' Good food is beyond sustenance. It's creativity and invention and mistakes and therapy and fun. When the credits ended, I wanted to hit the kitchen and plan a dinner party.

There is a sort of gross but funny epilogue to my Ratatouille story. I dreamt last night that I had a rat infestation in my apartment. In the dream, I was trying to fall asleep but kept hearing the usual creaks of my building. Then there was a scabbering, squeaking sound. It moved up and down the length of my room, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw a stream of huge, spaniel-sized rats pouring out from under my bed and into the closet. I was afraid to move. And they actually didn't look much like rats, but I knew exactly what they were. Finally they seemed to be gone and I got up to try to find my cell phone and call my landlord. But two rats were still lurking and tackled me. They started biting my feet. I fought them off, called my landlord and cried into the phone "It's two in the morning and there's rats everywhere and I've probably got rabies! Help me!" He sighed in exasperation and hung up.

And then I woke up, heels tingling from the phantom bites. It was five a.m. in real time and I had to rub my feet to make sure there were no marks. So I guess the lesson here is that as much as I love food, I don't love rats. The end.