Good morning! Now is a great time to make ratatouille, since you can still get nice eggplants and zucchini at the market, and having the oven on for hours isn’t the inferno that it is in the summer. I love making ratatouille the star of the meal, preferably served with some good cheese, a green salad and a baguette.
Melissa explains it all: RatatouilleI got several reader questions about whether it’s possible to use an air fryer to cook the individual vegetables instead of roasting. The answer is … yes! The goal of roasting all of the ingredients on different sheet pans is to condense and caramelize them separately, with each vegetable reaching its individual peak potential of golden tenderness before they all mingle for the final bake. The air fryer can accomplish this quickly; depending on your model, you might have to cook the vegetables in batches. Then make sure to continue with Step 8, which brings all of the flavors together. Or, to make things even simpler, you can make a streamlined ratatouille on a sheet pan and top it with crispy, spiced chickpeas for protein and crunch. View this recipe: Sheet-pan ratatouille with crispy chickpeas More food for thoughtHere are five more recipes that use last-call summer produce to create cozy, warming dishes. Eggplant adobo, anyone? For a limited time, you can enjoy free access to the recipes in this newsletter in our app. Download it on your iOS or Android device and create a free account to get started. Reading and eatingOf the many things I loved about Andrew Sean Greer’s latest novel, “Villa Coco,” at top of the list is the way he uses food as a lens into the differences between American and Italian culture. The book takes place in Tuscany in the 1990s, and tells the story of a young gay man’s friendship with a 92-year-old art-collecting Baronessa. A recurring joke is that no matter how difficult or somber a conversation among Italians may be, if a delicious dish is mentioned, everyone must take a moment to exclaim “buono!” before continuing. “It did not matter if the talk was of a death in the family, a crisis of the heart, or the Titanic disaster,” the narrator explains, “if one noted that the penultimate dish served to the ill-fated passengers had been foie gras, the very mention of the delicacy would bring cries of ‘buono!’” Read this book while savoring a big bowl of al dente pasta, perhaps with green beans, potatoes and pesto, a specialty of Liguria that comes up in the story. Buono!
What are you reading? Let me know at hellomelissa@nytimes.com — I’m always looking for my next great read. Melissa Clark has been writing about food for The New York Times since 1997 and is the author of 46 cookbooks. Her latest is “The Big Book of Dinner,” coming in November. You can reach her at hellomelissa@nytimes.com. Editors: Mia Leimkuhler and Li Goldstein. Host photo by Melanie Dunea. For help with your New York Times Cooking subscription, please email cookingcare@nytimes.com. Was this email forwarded to you? You can sign up for our New York Times Cooking newsletter here.
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